Two men have recently been arrested on suspicion of involvement in a car scam in the central region. The two, one of whom - Asaf Nishri - is the son of Kiryat Ono's mayor, are suspected of posing as private car owners and not telling potential car buyers that the vehicles for sale had been badly damaged in accidents.

Police believe that workers in vehicle test centers in the central region colluded with the suspects, substantiating their claim that the cars were in good condition.

"Every insurance company works with certain car traders to whom it sends cars whose value has decreased due to accidents. The insurance companies get these cars from leasing or rental companies," said Superintendent Ronen Ben Zvi on Monday.

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The suspects allegedly bought the cars, which had been badly damaged in accidents but not defined as a total loss, and had them repaired in the Palestinian Authority. "It is not clear where or how well they were repaired, but it is clear that these garages use spare parts of stolen Israeli cars," Ben Zvi said.

The repaired cars were repainted and handed back to the suspects, who sold them to buyers.

"They advertised the cars, mostly on the Internet, but posed as private car owners. Each suspect would tell potential buyers that the car was his wife's or mother's," he said.

They also forged the odometer reading, reducing the number of kilometers it showed, he said.

Police believe that workers in a number of vehicle test centers used to overlook various malfunctions when the traders brought the repaired cars with the prospective buyers for examination.

"In one case, a lawyer bought his mother a car from one of the suspects, but shortly afterward the car began to shake. A friend of his inspected it and found malfunctions. The lawyer went to the test center where the car had been examined, and the inspector told him he 'hadn't noticed' any of the malfunctions," Ben Zvi said.

"Often when the inspectors write 'in repair' on a car's examination sheet they don't mean merely a paint job but sawing off all the tin parts due to an accident," he said.

The two are suspected of selling some 200 vehicles of various kinds, all of which had been in accidents.

Ben Zvi advised car buyers to make sure to meet the person whose car they want to buy and to demand to see his identity card, to make sure he is, in fact, the registered owner.

He said the detectives had put the suspects' telephone number on Google and found it in dozens of ads for cars. "I suggest that buyers put up every phone number appearing on car ads on Google and if it appears too many times, it means the seller is a trader, not a private owner," Ben Zvi said.

More than 30 people have complained to the police of falling victim to this scam. The suspects were brought to the Ramle Magistrate's Court Monday, where their remand was extended by seven days.