We recently received a call from a reader who came across a site called Freecar.com. She thought it sounded too good to be true, and wanted us to check it out. The site looks slick and inviting, beckoning you to step inside your “free car.”

According to the site: “Hey, you’re gonna drive anyway. Why not let someone else pay you to do it! Easy money doesn't get much easier than this! We have listings of companies who will actually sponsor your car for $500 a month (sometimes even more!) or provide you with a car and a cash allowance.”

It’s not entirely clear how it all works (or what it really costs), since you have to submit your e-mail address to activate your membership and find out—a red flag. We didn’t have to sign up to warn the caller to avoid this site, since it’s missing several basic items crucial to a site’s credibility. First off, there’s no contact information, not even an e-mail address. Secondly, there's no indication who runs the site, or where it's based. Third, there’s no privacy policy. That's more than enough, according to WebWatch's guidelines for credible Web sites.

But we wanted to find out who owns this site, so we pasted the domain name into Whois.net. Turns out the site is registered to an “Ivory Investments” in Belize.

Also, while digging around, we came across two similar sites, one called Cruising4Cash.com and another called Driving4Dollars.com. Both these sites fail the test for reasons similar to Freecars.com, though despite their resemblance to that site, they’re both based in Palma de Mallorca.