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Terms & Conditions

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The short version. MaltaMotors is a place to advertise a vehicle and a place to find one. We are not the seller, we do not inspect the vehicles advertised here, we never hold your money, and we are not a party to any sale that follows a conversation started on this site.

The rest of this page sets out what you agree to when you use the site. It is written to be read, not to be skimmed past — the sections that actually constrain you are 4, 5 and 11.

1. About these terms

These terms are an agreement between you and [COMPANY LEGAL NAME], [REGISTERED ADDRESS, MALTA], company registration number [REGISTRATION NUMBER] (“MaltaMotors”, “we”, “us”). They cover the website at maltamotors.com and everything you can do on it: browsing, searching, saving a search, creating an account, publishing an advert and messaging a seller.

By using the site you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use the site.

How your personal data is handled is a separate document: the Privacy Policy. It forms part of this agreement.

2. What MaltaMotors is, and what it is not

MaltaMotors is a classified advertising platform. Private sellers and dealers publish adverts; buyers search them and contact the seller directly. That is the whole of the service.

In particular, MaltaMotors is not:

  • the seller. Every advert is placed by the person or business named on it. The contract of sale, if one is ever made, is between you and them and does not include us.
  • an inspector or a valuer. We do not see the vehicles, drive them, check their documents, verify their mileage or confirm their history. Nothing on this site is a statement by us that a vehicle is as described.
  • an escrow, a payment processor or a finance provider. No money passes through this site. If anyone tells you to pay MaltaMotors, or to pay through MaltaMotors, it is a fraud — please report it to support@maltamotors.com.
  • a delivery or shipping service. We arrange no transport of any kind.

Verification badges shown on some dealer profiles mean that we have checked that the business exists and is who it says it is. They are not a statement about any particular vehicle, price or transaction.

3. Your account

You can browse and search without an account. You need one to publish an advert, save a search, or read your messages on the site.

  • You must be at least 18 years old.
  • One person, one account. Give a real email address you can receive mail at — it is how we deliver enquiries about your vehicle and alerts for your saved searches.
  • Keep your password to yourself. Anything done through your account is treated as done by you, so tell us at once if you think someone else has access to it.
  • Keep your details accurate. A dealer must advertise under the business name it actually trades as.

You can stop using the site at any time. To have the account and its data deleted, write to us — see Your rights in the Privacy Policy.

4. Placing an advert

When you publish an advert you are making a public statement about a vehicle, and you are responsible for it. By publishing, you confirm that:

  • the vehicle exists, you own it, or you are authorised by the owner to advertise it;
  • it is genuinely for sale, at the price you have stated, and that price includes everything a buyer must pay you for the vehicle itself;
  • the description is accurate and complete — in particular the mileage, the year, the registration status, the condition, and whether it has been in an accident;
  • you have disclosed anything a reasonable buyer would want to know: outstanding finance, an insurance write-off, an imported or salvage history, a replacement engine, a known defect;
  • the photographs are of the actual vehicle you are advertising, and you own them or have permission to use them;
  • the advert complies with Maltese and EU law, including consumer protection law. If you are selling in the course of a business you must say so — a trader advertising as a private seller is a criminal offence, not a preference.

One advert per vehicle. Do not publish the same vehicle twice to appear more often in results, and do not delete and re-publish an advert to push it back to the top of a search.

5. What is not allowed

The following will get an advert removed and may get an account closed:

  • advertising a vehicle you cannot legally sell, including a stolen vehicle or one subject to an undisclosed finance agreement;
  • misrepresenting mileage, whether by altering an odometer or by stating a figure you know to be wrong;
  • a price that is not the real price — a deposit shown as the full price, or a figure chosen to place the advert in a cheaper filter band;
  • advertising anything other than the vehicle: services, parts unrelated to the listing, finance offers, or another website;
  • contacting sellers or buyers for anything other than the vehicle in question. The contact details on this site are not a marketing list, and using them as one is both a breach of these terms and a breach of data protection law;
  • automated collection of any kind — scraping, crawling beyond what robots.txt permits, harvesting email addresses or phone numbers, or bulk-downloading photographs;
  • attempting to interfere with the site: probing for vulnerabilities, circumventing rate limits, uploading anything malicious, or trying to reach data that is not yours. If you believe you have found a security flaw, please report it to security@maltamotors.com rather than exploring it further; we will not pursue anyone who tells us in good faith and gives us a reasonable chance to fix it;
  • impersonating another person, business or dealership;
  • abusive, discriminatory or threatening messages to anyone using the site.

6. Advert lifetime, moderation and removal

A published advert stays live for 90 days. After that it expires automatically and stops appearing in search. There is no self-service renewal yet — write to support@maltamotors.com and we will republish it for you.

We may reject, edit, hide or remove any advert, at any time, if we believe it breaches these terms or the law, or if it is a duplicate. We do this to keep the site usable — it is a right, not a promise: we do not review every advert before it goes live, and an advert being visible is not our endorsement of it.

If we remove your advert we will tell you why, unless telling you would interfere with an investigation or we are prevented from doing so by law.

7. Contacting a seller

The enquiry form sends your message, your name, your email address and — if you supply one — your phone number to the seller of that vehicle. The seller reads it in their dashboard and can reply; their reply reaches you by email, and that email thread is your copy of the conversation. You do not need an account to send an enquiry, and there is no page here where you can read it back — so keep the reply if you want a record of it.

Say what you need to say about the vehicle, and nothing else. Do not send payment details, identity documents or copies of your licence through this site: no legitimate seller needs them before you have met.

A note on safety, because we cannot enforce it for you: meet in a public place during daylight, see the vehicle and its documents before any money changes hands, and be very suspicious of a seller who will not meet, who is “abroad”, or who wants a deposit to hold the vehicle. We do not vet sellers.

8. Your photographs and text

Everything you upload stays yours. We do not claim ownership of your photographs or your description.

To be able to show your advert at all, you give us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, resize, re-encode and display that content on MaltaMotors and in the previews that appear when someone shares a link to your advert. The licence lasts as long as the advert is published, plus the time it takes for copies to fall out of caches and search-engine indexes we do not control.

You confirm that you have the right to give that licence. Do not upload a photograph you found somewhere else — a manufacturer's press image or another seller's photo of the same model is somebody's copyright, and it also misleads the buyer.

If you believe content on this site infringes your copyright, write to support@maltamotors.com with the URL, a description of the work and a statement that you hold the rights, and we will act on it.

9. Fees

Using MaltaMotors is currently free. Publishing an advert is free, contacting a seller is free, and there are no paid placements: search results are ordered by what you searched for, never by who paid.

If we introduce paid features we will publish the prices before they apply, and no charge will ever be made without you choosing it first. Nothing on this site takes a payment today.

10. Availability of the service

We work to keep the site up, but we do not promise that it will be available without interruption, that search results will be complete, or that every part of it will be free of defects. We deploy changes, run maintenance and depend on providers who occasionally fail.

We may change, suspend or discontinue any part of the service. If we discontinue something you rely on — the site as a whole, or your ability to reach adverts you have saved — we will give you reasonable notice where we can, so you can retrieve what matters to you.

11. Our responsibility to you

Because we are not the seller and do not check the vehicles, we are not responsible for a vehicle being other than as described, for a sale that goes wrong, or for anything a user of this site does to another. Your recourse in those cases is against the person you dealt with.

For everything else, our liability to you is limited to loss that was a foreseeable consequence of us breaking this agreement or failing to use reasonable care. We are not liable for lost profit, lost business, lost opportunity or loss of data.

Nothing here limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, this section does not affect your statutory rights under Maltese and EU consumer law — those rights exist whatever this page says.

12. Suspension and closure of accounts

We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, that is used for fraud, or that is being used to harm other people using the site. Where the breach is minor and fixable we will normally ask you to fix it first.

Closing an account removes your adverts from the site. It does not erase records we are required to keep — the Privacy Policy explains what is kept and for how long.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The date at the top of this page always shows when they last changed. If a change materially affects what you may do or what you are agreeing to, we will tell registered users by email before it takes effect.

Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the updated terms. If you do not accept them, stop using the site and ask us to close your account.

14. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the law of Malta, and the courts of Malta have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident in another EU member state, you keep the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country you live in, and you may bring proceedings there.

If something goes wrong, please write to us first — most things are settled that way. If we cannot settle it, you can take the matter to an approved alternative dispute resolution body. The European Commission publishes the list for every member state, Norway and Iceland at consumer-redress.ec.europa.eu.

If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest of them continue to apply.

15. Contact

Questions about these terms, reports of an advert that breaks them, and anything else: support@maltamotors.com.

Security reports: security@maltamotors.com.

Data protection questions: privacy@maltamotors.com — see the Privacy Policy.

Postal address: [REGISTERED ADDRESS, MALTA].

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