False advertising of boat

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salad

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Hello everyone,

I just felt I had to post this because frankly, I find it so utterly deceitful, it made me furious. It's hard enough finding a boat without having to deal with this rubbish.

History: I've been having a bit of mental back and forth following the responses you all kindly gave to my original threads on purchasing a boat. So tonight, I got looking at sport fishers and came across what appeared to be a fairly honest boat. Nice spec, a decent fishing boat, advertised on all the right sites.

However, further research has revealed that the broker/seller has had this listed for sale since at least 2018 (there are offers to buy from summer 2018!) and still has it listed as currently available, with the same exact photos and 2,000+ views on a certain major boat selling web site. The price being altered in the mean time, downwards, making it pretty damned good value. Almost too good. Something felt wrong, so I decided to look into it. Being an IT consultant specialising in web sillyness, I can dig relatively deep, and I do, especially with a purchase of this size. In this case, the information is thanks to simple cached versions of "for sale" pages. Sadly, that "simple" cached page wouldn't be visible by the vast majority of potential buyers.

The boat appears to be nothing more than click bait advertising. The boat simply isn't available for the advertised price and probably never was. Indeed, the ad type on one site was auto-described as "lead generation". I mean, seriously? I think that is actually illegal. You can't advertise a product as available for a given price when it isnt, can you?

I dare say if I enquired as to the availability, i'd get an email back saying "sorry that one has sold but we have xxxxx at £5k more".

Personally, I consider that a scam.

Has anyone come across this before? I'm so very tempted to out this company, because its such a waste of everyones time and also potentially illegal to boot.

Yes I am cross, but I honestly felt it better to post this, rather than not.

Take care, honest boaters.
 
I'm OK with people being slow to update web sites, it happens when you have a business to run. I'm just not OK with people actively altering listings over a year, for boats that arent available, simply to generate sales leads. If you see what I mean? The first is reasonable, the latter is deceitful and probably illegal?

That was a reply to jrudge.
 
markc said:
Bait & Switch, and not legal as far as I'm aware
Click to expand...

I'd imagine so mark.

The company site shows they have sold a fair few boats.

If someone is willing to do that, then what else are they willing to do.

I'm no social warrior, but if I sniff something that stinks, I feel obliged to call it out. I almost feel bad as I've barely posted apart from my own requests for help.
 
Phone the broker and ask if he is going to remove the old add or mark it as sold and doesn't mind being named on this thread.
A web search will find lots of boats that are sold but honestly advertised as such.
 
salad said:
I'm OK with people being slow to update web sites, it happens when you have a business to run. I'm just not OK with people actively altering listings over a year, for boats that arent available, simply to generate sales leads. If you see what I mean? The first is reasonable, the latter is deceitful and probably illegal?

That was a reply to jrudge.
Click to expand...

There is slow and slow. These were upwards of a year. They replied it was sold and would I like this one and still did not remove so it is endemic
 
It’s also very annoying when you see your own boat listed with a broker that you have not given any instruction to list it .
Happened to me a few years back .
 
Yup, commonplace unfortunately.

We went all the way to the South of France to look at some boats last year, and this happened to us. Thankfully it wasn't the only one that we were due to see in that location, but the vendor made a big deal about how he was waiting for us when in fact he wasn't and that the boat then mysteriously sold before we could come back to meet him the next day. He did, of course, have others boats available if we were interested but of course we took our business elsewhere.
 
I found this when I was last looking for a boat and it seemed to me less like a 'bait and switch' and more that brokers had so few listings that they were reluctant to remove boats promptly once sold as it made their listings look meagre (I don't know this for a fact, that was just the conclusion I reached as some had surprisingly few for sale - the old issue with so many having gone abroad and a lack of new boat sales 2006 onwards until recently).
 
Be also aware of the complete scam version of this rather than click bait and switch. The boat pictures and advert are stolen from a legit brokers site and offered at a very low price.

When you contact them you will be told that a "deposit" secures the boat which you have to pay immediately. Of course there is no boat, no broker and no sale and you end up with no deposit.
 
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