Don't be fooled by 'Check Your Car Tax online' google link

Beevo

Just by way of a 'heads-up' to anyone caught in the same way. After doing a search on google to check to see when my car tax would lapse the first link that showed up took me to a sight that APPEARED to be the GOV site I went to before, because it had the DVLA badge at the top. I put my car reg in and clicked the find my vehicle button. The next page said there was a £1,000 fine if you don't pay your tax which made me believe it must have run out already! Yikes! Straight below that it had a form to fill in to take payment. I nearly filled it in too.  Needless to say; This is NOT the gov website for the road tax office, it is an online company. It is very misleading for them to present their pages in this way.
The first link takes you to here:
https://ww1.vehicleinformation.uk/search4?tt=Tax&c=Check&v=Vehicle&i=Information&utm_campaign=912999759&utm_adgroup=45884404255&lid=1007292&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIgpnjnd2S6QIV0oBQBh1kKguvEAAYASAAEgIuwvD_BwE
and the second, after you click 'find my vehicle' goes straight to this payment page.

https://ww1.vehicleinformation.uk/payment-tp

I'm hoping this will help others avoid this trap.

AdrianC

Yes, it has a logo that says "DVLA"... And the sentence after it reads "Vehicle information provided by DVLA licensed data company."

FWIW, that isn't the DVLA logo... It's vaguely similar, but no more. This is the correct one.


The page title is "Pay 50p to continue | Vehicle Information"

Then, just below the form asking for payment details for the 50p to get access to the information, it says...
"Access Vehicle Information for 24 hours for £0.50. Includes a vehicle history check worth £14.95. By completing this form you consent and agree to monthly recurring payments of £5.95 thereafter. The service can be cancelled by the user at any time. View full terms."

Simple answer: LOOK AT THE SEARCH RESULTS. Google would have flagged that link as a "sponsored" link - ie a paid ad. It was not a .gov.uk URL.

Install an adblocker in your browser, and you won't ever see these commercial links.

suegalway

I searched for pay car tax and the Vehicle Information site came up. I entered all the details including my card details and CCV but before I pressed the button to pay, I realised that I wasn't on the DVLA site. I closed it down immediately but I didn't delete my card details. Do you think they can use them even though I didn't go ahead and press PAY?

Nasqueron

suegalway said:

I searched for pay car tax and the Vehicle Information site came up. I entered all the details including my card details and CCV but before I pressed the button to pay, I realised that I wasn't on the DVLA site. I closed it down immediately but I didn't delete my card details. Do you think they can use them even though I didn't go ahead and press PAY?

If it's a secure site, they would not get your details even if you proceeded but no, they would not go to the trouble of some sort of expensive keylogging software to try and record card details as you type them