Cloned Vehicle - insurers to chase us for money!

DoaM

Find a local solicitor who has experience in this area of law and see if you can get a free 30 minute consultation. And/Or ... do you have motor legal protection as part of your car insurance? (Or even legal protection as part of your home insurance?)

Scrapit

HelpRach said:

Looking for advice again!
So a year and 2 months on from my original post we have today received a letter from a solicitor working on behalf of BMW Stratstone to claim the cost of the vehicle we now own, this is how much they say they are out of pocket because the insurer of the cloned vehicle had claimed the stolen vehicle back.
They have said we need to pay the £22k+ costs in the next 14 days or we will be taken to court. As someone who has never been in trouble or owed anyone money this has worried me terribly.
They say that in the contract we signed with them, we had signed to say we were the owners of the vehicle and had the right to sell it but we didn't because it was stolen so we have broken the contract.
Obviously I can see where the are coming from but at the time we believed we were the genuine owners of the car, BMW were only able to find out it was a clone but stripping it which obviously we couldn't do.
We collected the vehicle from the address on the log book, (I realise now this may have been fake but how would we have known!), we checked the vin number on the log book against the one of the engine, we did all the online checks and were able to check all the service history online as we had the vin number. Again I realise this was all false info but if BMW didn't know this, how would we? In all honesty if I had know it was cloned I would not have take it to a trader! We also paid most of the money into the bank account of the sellers partner, or so we thought. 
We realise we were duped but we did not intentionally dupe BMW, we will obviously take legal advice on this but I wondered what you all thought about where we stand with this?
Thanks

Sounds like you've frustrated the contract rather than broken it. You didnt know it was a clone so you signed the contract in good faith.

HelpRach

Yes I will look into that, although I am not with the same insurer I was for the Land Rover so not sure if they would now help me.

DoaM said:

Find a local solicitor who has experience in this area of law and see if you can get a free 30 minute consultation. And/Or ... do you have motor legal protection as part of your car insurance? (Or even legal protection as part of your home insuranceScrapit said:

CardinalWolsey

Did you buy your HPI direct from HPI? Have you read the terms here to see if you might have a claim? https://www.hpi.co.uk/guides/guarantee.html