Electronic signatures have made buying and selling vehicles much easier. But they also create new risks. A member brought one such risk to our attention recently.

A customer can easily change a proposed bill of sale before signing it, and the dealer may not notice. That is why dealers should always compare the signed contract they receive with the one they originally sent.

Imagine this situation:

A dealer sends a customer an electronically signed bill of sale the dealer has signed. Before the customer signs it, the customer edits the document and does not mention this to the dealer. The customer removes the “Sales Final” clause from the bill of sale and the clause that allows the dealer to recover its damages from the customer’s deposit if the customer fails to complete the purchase.

Those changes are important. Under Ontario contract law, a person usually accepts an offer by agreeing to the same terms. If someone changes important parts of the contract before signing it, they may not be accepting the offer at all. Instead, they may be making a new offer, called a counteroffer.

In this example, the dealer signed one version of the contract, but the customer signed a different one. If the dealer never agreed to those new terms, there is a strong argument that the parties never reached agreement. If that is the case, a court could find that no binding agreement was ever formed.

Even more important, the missing “Sales Final” clause creates another legal issue. Ontario’s Motor Vehicle Dealers Act, 2002 (MVDA) requires that certain terms appear on bills of sale. “Sales Final” is one such required term. This unilateral change by the consumer could have placed the dealer in breach of the MVDA.

The lesson is simple.

Never assume that the contract you receive back is the same one you sent out. Always compare the documents before treating the deal as complete.

Even better, use a secure electronic signature platform, such as DocuSign. These services help protect documents from being changed without detection and create an audit trail showing who signed the document and when. Another option is to send the file in a format that is not editable by the customer. While no system can prevent every problem, secure e-signature platforms make it much harder for changes to go unnoticed.

Remote signing is fast and convenient, but that also creates risk. Take a few extra minutes to check the final document and avoid problems.