PacEmaker wrote: ↑Wed Apr 29, 2020 8:13 pmI have no idea if the car was thrashed or even if it was actually stolen or someone tried to steal stuff out of it.
Sounds like you got scammed. You went into it expecting typical theft-related damage, instead you had considerable non-theft-related damage.
Only-slightly-related-story:
A decade or two ago, body shops were making a killing by convincing people with mid-aged insurance writeoffs to sell them their cars for practically salvage value. The key being, these vehicles had some slightly cosmetic damage that wrote them off (a light scratch across multiple body panels might do it on a vehicle not worth a paint job to make it perfect again ($5000)). The vehicles, even though written off, were perfectly mechanically capable and driveable vehicles that deserve a half-assed touchup job, but just couldn't be repaired to their before-collision status (perfect paint) cost-effectively. So, $7000 car that needs $5000 of paintwork = writeoff. But still worth like, $6000 with a quick scrap-repair.
So body shops were taking advantage of everyone who didn't understand this, and offering them $200 for their $6000 car because "it's a writeoff". Business was so good, that they had to compete with each other. Still a rip off to the owners, but prices were going up to like, $1500 and $2000 for these "writeoffs". Usually sold by nothing more than pictures to see the scratches and "dead batteries" because they'd been sitting.
So a friend of mine and his friends, enterprising teenagers would buy actual junk cars at salvage auctions. The ones where engines were nearly exploded or transmissions blown out, needed front or rear end rebuilds, or were otherwise worthless because they needed more repairs than they were worth. They were paying the $200 per vehicle.
Then, they'd drive, or push them at slow speeds into low-angle collisions in parking lots. Just enough to scrape up a body panel or two.
Then they'd take pictures, and/or report the vehicles as "self-assessed write-off" to get it branded as a salvage, same as insurance write-offs without any insurance hit.
They'd sell these POS, mechanically-unsound $200 cars to the desperate greedy autobody shops for $2000, who thought they were ripping the gullible consumer off by offering them $2000 for their $5000 car with what they identified were "just some scratches" in the pictures, but were actually getting a $200 car that they'd waste time diagnosing and eventually realize wasn't worth repairing. But after getting burned on that, well now they *really* need to lowball the next guy.
They did this to dozens/hundreds of cars and single-handedly, eventually ruined the market for this after basically every bodyshop in town bought their 3rd or 4th surprise lemon in a row from them or their friends when they thought they were pulling a good scam.
Sometimes they'd even sell both vehicles in the collision to the same shop, super convincing that that was the only reason those two vehicles were written off.
After a while they started doing better inspections, by which point consumers would figure out what their "written off" cars were worth.
