Couple face eviction after falling victim to Facebook campervan scam: 'We’ll end up living in a tent'

The pair, who own 10 dogs, thoroughly searched the internet to find something suitable to cater to their needs, and after six weeks of searching, they found a campervan costing £13,000 on Facebook that they believed checked all the boxes. After a video call tour of the vehicle, where nothing seemed amiss, the pair sent the seller a deposit of £500 to secure it.

The 62-year-old, accompanied by his step-son, then took a train down to Leeds in January to bring their new home-on-wheels back to Scotland. Upon arriving at the station and waiting for the seller who agreed to pick him up, Stef began to panic when his texts were going unanswered.

He told GB News: “At this point I was thinking, I'm going to end up having to take a train home and I've just lost £500. I thought maybe that was the scam, just the deposit gone.”

“If only,” he said, reminiscing on how unaware he was that the worst was yet to come.

The seller finally arrived at the train station and the three of them drove to his house in Castleford where the campervan was waiting. However, upon meeting, the seller told them that his step-father had just had a heart attack and he needed to quickly get to the hospital, which Stef believes put “pressure [on him] to get the deal closed”.

Despite seeing the campervan parked some 50 yards away, Stef never stepped inside to check it out before he handed over the money, a decision to this day he still cannot fathom.

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He explained: “I got sucked into the drama of the heart attack and them both needing to get to the hospital. We walked into the house behind him and immediately his wife walked out and got in the car and she sat there waiting. So he did the V5 document and that was it.

“For some reason, and I can't for the life of me explain why, I gave him the balance of the money. To this day, I can only blame myself. I hadn't even seen it and I gave him the money”, he lamented.

Recollecting on the impulse decision, he said the heart attack rouse definitely impacted his thought process: “It was pressurising of course for him to say ‘Oh let's get the deal done. I have to get to the hospital. My wife’s waiting in the car so we need to go’. So that probably didn't help.”

The seller accompanied them to the petrol station to fill up the tank, with Stef sitting in the passenger seat, still unaware that the interior of the van was “unfit for purpose”. The seller then left to join his wife, who was following alongside them in her own vehicle.

Only when Stef was alone with his step-son did he inspect the inside, and what he saw left him “heartbroken”, and called his wife “in tears on the side of the road”.

“It was unfit for purpose. It was full of black mould water and nothing worked. And I do mean nothing worked, not even the heaters and the engine only just”.

A “gutted” Stef had no option but to drive the vehicle home, a process that left him and his step-son “frozen” on their six-hour journey back to Scotland, thankful that the faulty vehicle didn’t break down on the motorway.

Carla inspected the campervan and asked her husband if they could fix it, to which he replied that fixing it would only leave them in an even worse financial position.

He explained: “It’s going to cost tens of thousands of pounds to rip all the inside out and basically have to redo the entire thing. It just wasn't economical to do.

“We don't have any money. I'd borrowed the money in order to buy it. So we were left, excuse my language, in s***’s creek.”

The couple reached out to mobile home sellers and eventually found a company that was willing to purchase the van at £6,500, half of what they paid and a “heartbreaking” figure.

“It was better than nothing. But it left us in a position where we actually had more debt than what we could afford. And the whole point of the exercise was to reduce the debt so we could have an affordable level of income. And now that has increased and left us with nothing at all.

“So the upshot of the whole situation now is that we're in a situation where we can't afford to stay where we are, but we can't afford to leave either.”

The couple are sadly no strangers to misfortune. The pair met in 2009 after both their teenage daughters, who were friends at school, tragically died months apart from each other.

“It’s something that you have to live with. It's not something you get over, but that's what brought us together.”

Now, 15 years after their tragedies, even more hardship could be on the way as the pair fear that an eviction notice is looming.

“I won’t give up my dogs, they’re our family. So future-wise, it’s probably looking like we'll be living in a tent.”

Recollecting on the purchase, he said: “I cast myself as quite an intelligent guy. Not the most intelligent in the world, but certainly not stupid. But I did an exceptionally stupid thing. It's one of those things you think ‘It would never happen to me. I'd never fall for it.’ And then, it did.

“I think it's definitely 100 per cent more about their ability to sway you and put pressure rather than any sort of comment on your intelligence. It's not so much your gullibility. It's where your morality lies. I would never dream of doing that to anybody so it’s shocking when you encounter someone who does.”

Asked what advice he would give to those looking to purchase a mobile home online, he said: “You set off with that goal. Make sure you complete that goal. And if it's not meeting your requirements that you set off with, don't part with the money. As simple as that.

“I would also recommend not paying the deposit. Just agree to go and see it if they're not going to. If they're not prepared to let you see it without paying a deposit, then it's not worth your time.”