OTTAWA – It appears thieves have found a new way to try to steal your vehicle when you’re selling it online.

A caller to our rock station, 106.1 CHEZ, says his son listed his car online. Two men who looked at the car said they would buy it but needed to go to the bank first.

“My son comes back in the house and he says, ‘I think that was a scam,'” the caller told the Doc and Woody Radio Show. The son went back out to the car and realized he was holding a different car key.

“The guys actually switched the key,” he said. “They gave a Nissan key that didn’t work with the car.”

The man and his son called the police before the would-be buyer returned about 20 minutes later, opened the car and got in.

The slight-of-hand technique has been used in the United States for a couple of years, but it’s new to Ottawa fraud investigators.

“In my experience, I haven’t seen that specific scam before, no,” said Sgt. Jamie Ritchie, Organized Fraud Section, Ottawa Police.

“Sometimes we’ll have where vehicles are misrepresented — the old classic of rolling back the odometer,” he said.

Sgt. Ritchie tells 1310 NEWS, another common case for fraud investigators is where someone buying a car advertised online pays for the vehicle, but is told it needs a repair first and then never receives it.

Given this new technique, he says it might be a good idea for people listing their vehicles online to check the keys after each test drive.