Josh Thomson Truck Recovery Fund

The following is from my NATCA Union Brother Josh. He and his family just relocated from Northern California.  Lend a hand to Josh and his family.

My name is Josh Thomson, I would like to share my story with you in hopes that you don't suffer the same loss that my family has. I purchased a stolen truck on Craigslist.org and lost $20,000 on March 10th, 2020. I didn't even know that it was stolen until I went to transfer the title into my name and was confronted by the police.

I was able to present them with a title, bill of sale, photocopy of the seller's driver's license and even the keys to the truck. The sale was straight forward and seemed honest. The seller gave me a title with official seals and everything. The driver's license information matched the title, the title matched the vin. The CarFax report came back clean and matched the seller's information. I even did a VIN check on NICB.org (National Insurance Crime Bureau) to ensure that the vehicle wasn't stolen or salvaged - everything checked out. With title in hand and bill of sale recorded, I gave the seller $20,000 and drove home. 

The next day, the police told me that it was all forged and was a very high-end job. I was told that the seller paid a lot of money for the title forgery and that I did everything that I should have done to ensure that I purchased a vehicle safely. As it turns out, the vehicle was stolen from a dealership on Saturday and was reported stolen first thing Monday morning and I purchased and ran the CarFax and NICB.org VIN check on Tuesday. The report goes into a police database and sometime later gets reported publicly to places like CarFax and NICB.org. Unfortunately, the truck had been reported stolen for over 24 hours and still hadn't been reported publicly so my due diligence came back with a false report.
This is an enormous loss for my family and will set us back financially. The police informed me that the local police department could have confirmed that the vehicle was stolen and that it would be a safer place to make a transaction like this in the future. I will certainly be checking with the police department for future purchases and hope that you do the same. Please learn from my loss and don't let this happen to you and your family.


Josh Thomson