The camera is a few inches from the front fender of a black Kia Sorento, and a finger is tracing a line of scratches across the paint. “But you didn’t tell,” the on screen caption reads, one word at a time. The video, posted on Instagram by @greggotcars, an account whose tags mark it as a car dealer’s, opens with the headline “Seller Tries To ‘Car Catfish’ Me… Then Gets UPSET When I Passed?!”

His caption gives the outline. “The pictures he sent made the car look pretty clean, but once it showed up there was damage on almost every panel that I couldn’t see beforehand,” he writes. “At that point I decided to pass, and he felt like I wasted his time.” The faces of the seller and the people with him are blurred throughout.

The first minute is a walkaround of the SUV in a parking lot. The camera moves from the front fender down the driver’s side to the rear quarter panel and tailgate, and the captions pick up the buyer pointing out damage: “in the fender,” “this wasn’t in the,” “panel.” Up close the black paint is covered in fine scratches and swirls, with deeper marks on the doors.

Then he pulls out his phone. Around the 55 second mark, a photo of the same black Sorento appears on screen, parked on a lawn in front of a house, shining and showing none of the marks. The buyer holds the phone up beside the real car and flicks through the pictures. “Even if you zoom,” the captions read, followed by “so you can’t see.”

The middle of the video is the conversation in the lot. The seller does much of the talking with his hands. The captions catch “scratches on every” from one side of the argument and “it’s not rotted out” from the other. A price of “seventy six hundred” comes up, and so do Carvana and CarMax, as the two men go back and forth over what the car would bring elsewhere and who has looked at it; because the captions show only one or two words at a time, the details of that exchange cannot be pieced together reliably.

The seller’s position comes through near the end. Bending beside the open driver’s door, he points at the marks. “They’re surface,” the captions read, and the words “with polishing” follow. The buyer ends it with a caption over a shot of the scratched rear door: “It’s just a waste.” He passes on the car.

Federal guidance backs the buyer’s instinct to see a car in person before committing. The Federal Trade Commission says it is “always a good idea to pay for an independent mechanic to conduct a mechanical inspection of a used car,” and that a vehicle history report is “not a substitute for an independent vehicle inspection.” The Justice Department’s National Motor Vehicle Title Information System likewise tells buyers they are “strongly encouraged to obtain an independent vehicle inspection” before they buy.

If you are selling a car privately and want to avoid this exact scene, photograph it dry, in daylight, and include close ups of every panel, not just wide shots. Name each flaw in writing before the buyer makes the trip so nothing comes as a surprise, and if you believe scratches will polish out, polish them first so the car matches its pictures.

If you are the buyer, ask for a short walkaround video in daylight before you agree to meet, with the camera held close along each side, plus a clear photo of the odometer. Ask directly whether there is any damage on each panel and keep the seller’s answers in writing, so that if the car arrives looking different, as the Sorento did here, you can point to what you were told.

When the car in front of you does not match the photos, do what this buyer did and compare them on the spot, panel by panel, with the seller there. Then decide whether to make a lower offer or walk away, and say plainly which flaws drove that decision. If the car is worth pursuing, the next step is still an independent inspection before any money changes hands.