Scam

The Federal Bureau of Investigations has shut down a car theft ring operating in the U.S. for more than 20 years, causing in excess of $25 million in losses to owners and banks. According to CNN, the ring would clone cars, swiping the legal identity of one car – VIN numbers, tags, stickers -- and applying it to another, stolen car. The cloned car would then be sold to a dealer or consumer, and the countdown would begin: Eventually, most would be discovered as stolen property and confiscate

If you haven't gotten the automated phone call frantically saying that you desperately need to speak to someone about your car's warranty, consider yourself lucky. If you gave in and actually bought an expired warranty from these spineless telemarketers, good luck getting reimbursed for car repairs.

The Coast to Coast Am late night radio talk show, hosted nowadays by George Noory, often lends a sympathetic ear to those with a bizarre tale to tell or folks making outlandish claims. After being deluged with calls and emails to the show asking about assertions made of increasing gas mileage using kits such as those sold by Water4gas, (they claim to break water down

Thanks to our reader Mike, we have an update to share about the troubled history of Michael Papp electric vehicle company. Regular readers will remember that Papp is the man behind Spark EV, a company that has been accused more than once of shady dealings. It looks like the New Jersey law officials agree, and have decided to step in to put a stop to Papp's scam.

Remember a while back when a company tried and failed to show off their "free energy" machine? For the purposes of this post, we'll simply refer to that event as the "Stoern debacle." That company claims that their machine is capable of giving off more energy than it takes to run it. In fact, 285 times more energy! Yeah, but it turns out that the last time that they tried to show off their wares, the machine failed to work.

The vast majority of service technicians are honorable, hard-working folks. It's the rotten few that will rake you over the coals when given the chance, giving the entire profession a bad name. Wise Bread, a personal finance website, tells of a Mercedes-Benz owner who seems to have encountered one of the latter. The gentleman in question had a moonroof that was on the fritz, so he took it in for service. T

Both Volkswagen and Google have responded to criticism that the automaker's web pages were in violation of Google's quality guidelines. The uproar centers around hidden keywords in flash-based pages.

Many used car buyers are completely unaware that their airbags might not deploy in the event of an accident. There are a few reasons for this, but the most prevalent is a scam in which a car that's experienced a previous collision has had its deployed airbag improperly replaced, sometimes with stolen airbag units from other cars and sometimes with nothing more than stuff like packing peanuts or whatever else was lying around the shop.

So you think that car salesman and dealerships have overcome their oft-deserved reputation for being sleazy? After reading this story, our semi-restored faith in the process of buying a car has been decimated.

In high school my best friend and I convinced his sister that the sphincter valve on her car was broken and leaking blinker fluid all over the driveway. She freaked and offered us money to drive it up to their family mechanic and have it fixed. We took the money and blew it on Golden Tee.