Which is an important thing to check for, if you ever buy a used car. Some not-so-honest used car dealerships sell cars which have persistent ECU faults - which would result in a check engine light. To prevent the buyers from seeing these they just snip off the check engines LED from the instrument cluster board.

Here in Germany, there have been several fraud cases where car dealers don’t actually own the cars they’re selling. Instead, they’re selling them on consignment for someone else. That means when you buy the car, you don’t really know who the actual seller is, as the dealer just can say "ah, sorrybI didn't know about that" . It’s a strange setup — and quite risky for the buyer, because it makes it hard to any legal rights if something goes wrong.

Btw these cars frequently are from salvage auctions in the us, then sent to eastern Europe to be fixed up so they look good from the outside and last being sold on small "used car" dealer lots as "pigs with lipstick".

That is even more likely. I failed to get my head outside of the scenario as presented.