Dealers are scummy. While not all dealers do business the bad way, it’s a the business that seems to attract shady operators. Commission leads to greed, leads to carelessness, leads to ruthlessness, leads to a constant need to look for that next hit/sale.
We’ve covered the worst parts of it over the years. Be it markups or sales people trying to get one over on customers its all been on the site. So check a few of the worst dealer stories we’ve covered here at Jalopnik.
Thirty-seven-year-old Martin D’Amato worked in digital advertising for Pine Belt Nissan of Toms River. His position allowed him the power to hire both advertising and marketing companies as he saw fit for the dealership’s advertising. That power enabled his scam.
D’Amato’s alleged grift was rather blatant. Reports say the scam began when he created multiple shell advertising LLCs that he personally had control over. He would in turn “hire” these companies to do ad and marketing work for the dealership. He would then charge the “services” rendered by these companies using to the dealer’s corporate credit card. Of course, none of these services were rendered because the companies didn’t exist.
Read the rest of the story here.
According to a report in The Daily Herald, Josue Javier pled guilty to numerous felonies including communication fraud and theft by deception for scamming car buyers. Prosecutors provided evidence that Javier sold 18 cars to buyers that he did not own nor possess the titles for. When buyers could not register these cars and confronted Javier he would try to get them to buy a more expensive car or refuse to return their money.
Judge Darold McDade ordered Javier to serve 120 days in prison and pay back a total of $124,915 to his victims, $25,000 of which must be paid back within 75 days. However, rather than send him behind bars, the Judged agreed to have him serve his via GPS monitoring so he can work to pay his restitution.
Check out the story here.
It starts with a C6 Corvette Grand Sport that Driven Autoplex, the dealer of performance cars, was selling. Advanced Modern Performance (AMP), the tuner shop, was interested in the car, and so sent two of their employees out to check out the car.
The AMP employees wanted to take the car back to their shop to inspect it, but Kevin Lindsey, owner of Driven Autoplex, asked them to just check out the car on location, and offered the use of their workbay and lift to do so. AMP’s employees agreed, and the ‘Vette was placed on the lift so the AMP employees could inspect the car.
Here’s where it gets weird. One of the AMP employees asked Kevin to come out to look at the car AMP brought for a potential trade-in, and while Kevin was out with the employee and looking at the trade-in, the other employee, named Sergey, was inspecting the Corvette.
So, what happened here—and these facts are not disputed by either side—is that Sergey cut the oil filter in half, took a bag of metal shavings out of his pocket, and then filled the oil filter with metal shavings, which would make it seem as though the ‘Vette’s engine was in very bad shape indeed.
This story gets weirder and has an even weirder update. You can check it out here.
I got a tip from a reader who was searching for a cheap pickup in New England and he was flabbergasted as to what his local Nissan store was charging for a used truck!
Tom McParland highlighted one greedy Nissan dealer that priced a used base model last generation Frontier $5,000 over it’s original MSRP. Worse yet, the truck had almost 10,000 miles on it. You can check out the story here.
...tells the story of a man, his wife, and the Bronco she ordered. After years of staying home with their kids, she went back to work and wanted to do something nice for herself. So she ordered a fully-loaded Bronco Outer Banks with an MSRP of $52,810 from Moon Township Ford in Coraopolis, PA. Her husband worked at the dealership for nearly 20 years, so he thought he had an in with them. Six days before the Bronco was set to arrive at the dealership, they received a call. The dealer was going to have to add on a $10,000 markup.
This was just one of a few times that a Ford dealer hit a Bronco reservation holder with a markup as soon as their vehicle landed at the dealer. You can read the rest of the ordeal here.
Ricardo Perez was at one point a salesperson at Dick Scott Jeep, Ram, Dodge, Chrysler in Plymouth, Michigan. But apparently just sticking to selling cars wasn’t enough for Perez. He was fired in the summer of 2021 for fraud and theft. Rather than try to find a position at another dealership, he decided to take his dealer contacts and continue grifting by creating an elaborate web of a scam.
In his grift, Perez would still pose as a salesperson from Dick Scott Jeep and allegedly offer customers what’s known as a lease pull ahead. Those are deals that get customers out of their current leases early and into a newer vehicle.
Sadly the circumstances of the Covid pandemic helped this guy’s scam appear more legit. You can read more about the grift here.
One day last December, Tanisha Coley visited a Kia dealership in Stamford, Connecticut and filled out a computer-based credit application to figure out what kind of car she could afford. Soon after, she left without buying a vehicle, but ended up more than $17,000 in debt anyway.
Weeks later, Coley discovered something alarming had been registered on her credit report: an auto loan, opened on Dec. 12, 2016 at the dealer, for a 2013 Mazda. The loan had a total balance of $17,737, the report said.
But Coley was nowhere near the dealer that day, her attorney, Joanne Faulkner, said. “The dealer actually called her that day and said, ‘We’re still trying to get you this car,’” Faulkner told Jalopnik.
The Kia dealer, according to a lawsuit Coley later filed, “had electronically booked the car loan for Ms. Coley with Credit Acceptance Corp. for a 2013 Mazda that she never purchased or took possession of.”
Electronic loan contracts can easily lead to precarious situations for customers. Read the extensive report of how its happened to numerous customers at various dealerships here.
The ringleader in the fraud was Bobby Mayes, owner and CEO of Big Red dealership group out of Norman, Oklahoma. Along with the Kia dealer in question, the group also has a second Kia dealer, a Yamaha and Mitsubishi store, and a used car store.
The grift: Mayes and two of his employees, Charles Gooch and Courtney Wells, used the dealer to target customers with low credit scores. Somehow they convinced finance companies to issue auto loans to people who never should have been approved.
This story gets worse, with the Mayes even going so far as setting up a shell company to funnel the funds through. Read more about the grift here.
Parkway Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram dealership, you might have walked out with a damn good deal. In fact, your deal might have been too good to be true. That’s because Nimo was illegally using employee discounts to cut customers good deals, even when those customers failed to qualify for that discount, Auto News reports. In fact, he scammed FCA—now Stellantis—out.
Nimo frequently topped the list of auto sellers who sold cars using employee discounts and was handsomely rewarded for being a top salesman. He reportedly received $700,000 in bonuses directly from FCA since 2014, when he first started using his codes—and that’s in addition to dealership-specific rewards.
A double whammy of causing a multi billion dollar automaker to loose millions of dollars because of handing out employee discounts like candy and making hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses because of it is wild. Check out more on the story here.
The indictments say the ex-employees created or altered documents sent to financial institutions that boosted the incomes of prospective buyers; told managers and salesmen to submit fraudulent documents to banks to misrepresent proof of their customers’ residencies; presented “straw buyers” to banks when the actual buyers couldn’t qualify; and, best of all, listed accessories not actually included on their vehicles so a banks would increase the loan amount. This meant more commission for the employees.
Being so greedy that you’re willing to screw over the company you work for is pretty pathetic. Read more about the scam here.
Now weirdly, there were three Grand Cherokees. New ones, too, she could see window stickers. What was even weirder is how they had been parked. The two on either side of the car had been parked so close that she wouldn’t be able to get in her car and leave. And why was one parked lengthwise behind the car? It’s almost like they were trying to keep her from leaving.
It’s disturbing to hear stories about customers being held against their will inside of a dealership. My mom probably has the worst story of them all. Read more about it here.
Priority Chevrolet decided after the fact that it had sold a Chevy Traverse for $6,000 short of its actual value. When the buyer refused to return it, they tried to have him arrested for theft. He answered that challenge with the biggest “fuck you” an American can utter. A $2.2 million law suit.
Greed is a hell of a drug. Read about the rest of the ordeal here.
Sixteen-year-old Jonathan Fredricks worked at Chick-Fil-A for over a year to save up enough money to buy his first car. And it wasn’t just a tiny sum of money, it was $10,000.
So the teen directly paid Steelman $9,893 for the CX-5, because again, Steelman owned the vehicle. Five months later, while Fredricks was out shopping, he exited the store to find his vehicle getting towed.
This whole story was wild from the start. A dealer sells a teen a car he pays cash for, bur turns out the car wasn’t supposed to be sold to begin with. Its a roller coaster of a story that you can check out here. It also has a happy ending you can read about here.
Thanks to a craptastically-configured auction, a member of the ChallengerTalk forums snagged a steal-of-a-deal on a usually-goes-for-$45K Dodge Challenger SRT8 for just $29,100. Now the Signal Hill, CA car dealer’s trying to back out of the deal.
The dealer botched the auction and wanted their car back. Unfortunately for them, it doesn’t work like that. Read about the whole ordeal here.
An M5Board forum member took his 2007 BMW M5 to the dealer for brakes and fresh oil. Their 20-year-old tech crashed it during a test drive. The dealership’s offering him $2500 in parts. The problem? There’s $30,000 in damage.
Imagine taking your luxury super sedan in for service only to get a call not long after that its been wrecked, by the dealer no less. It’s the stuff true crime documentaries are made of. Read more about it here.