SANFORD, NC — A financial setback for Hurricane Helene victim Rod Ashby. A scam has cost him nearly $40,000 as he is still desperately searching for his wife, Kim.

Our sister station in Raleigh, ABC11, first reported about Rod and Kim Ashby, a Sanford couple who were at their mountain home in western North Carolina when Helene hit. Ashby’s home in Elk Park, near Banner Elk, was swept away by floodwaters with them inside.

The couple clung to each other until they hit a tree and were separated. Rod arrived safely; he hasn’t seen Kim since.

Days after Helene, Rod and crews searched for Kim, but more than a month after Helene hit her, the search continues.

“We just want to have closure. I mean, nobody wants to leave their loved ones on a mountain,” said Rod’s daughter, Ansley Ashby.

To get that closure, Rod wants to keep looking for Kim. He lost his truck in Helene when the thick mud and waters destroyed it.

He is currently staying with his family in Pittsboro and wants to buy a new truck to continue his search for Kim in the mountains.

“All he wants to do is get back out there, be able to provide resources to people doing search and rescue and help as much as he can, but it’s very difficult to navigate the roads without four-wheel drive. vehicle and we just don’t have another one. So he was just trying to get a truck back so he could go,” Ansley added.

Looking for a new truck, Rod found a 2020 Ford F-350 for $38,900 on a website that claimed to be a Colorado car dealership that only sold repossessed cars.

It was a deal Ansley said she was skeptical about. Still, she talked to the seller on the phone, got emails about the deal, got a contract, and even got a deed of sale.

“Everything checked out to me. The email matched, the phone numbers matched, everything looked legit,” she said.

Rod wired the money and got a confirmation saying the truck would be shipped in a few days.

“Hopefully they should have had the truck by the 30th and could be back in the mountains by then and that’s when things started to go wrong,” added Ansley.

Horribly wrong as they noticed the truck was still listed for sale on the site and quickly learned the deal was a scam. In reality, the website was just a copycat site of a real car business.

The Ashbys contacted the banks involved and filed a fraud report and tried to stop the wire transfer, but were told it could take up to 90 days for a response, which Ansley said was too long to wait .

“Imagine if it was your wife, your son, anybody out there like you want to be there, you want to search, you want to find them just like everyone else. So I think it was like another punch in the gut. he’s like, ‘OK, well, now this went wrong and now this has set me back even more,'” Ansley said.

Rod filed a police report and said officers are investigating.

ABC11 Troubleshooter Diane Wilson spoke to the owner of the legitimate car dealership in Colorado that the scammer had impersonated. He said that for the past few months, he has received so many calls daily from people who thought they were buying a car from him, but instead it was the scammer. He said the scammer was not pricing the vehicles to make them attractive to people and let them down. He also said he was cooperating with law enforcement.

Wilson also tried to contact the scammer, but the website is now down, an email to the company came back as undeliverable and their phone number is busy.

Wilson also contacted the two banks involved in the wire transfer. One responded with the following statement:

“We take the privacy and security of our members’ financial information very seriously. Accordingly, we may disclose information about account-specific inquiries and procedures only to the member.”

The best advice when buying a car online is that you can never be too careful. It is very easy for a scammer to duplicate a sales listing and website to make them look legitimate.