Car Dealers’ Dirtiest Tactic Comes Under Fire

Not all car dealerships are bad. However, there is definitely a reason why a lot of people would rather avoid the dealership experience and why dealerships have gotten the reputation that they have.

Now, as somebody who has been around the world of wheels for 30 years and has spent an extensive amount of time in the automotive journalism community, I thought that I had heard at all. However, apparently, there is one especially devious tactic that some scummy dealers are using to basically steal money from customers and the worst part is that it’s perfectly legal in some states.

The concept is called a “yo-yo.”

The basic premise is that a dealership can sell a car and say that they have financing for the buyer when they really don’t. There are plenty of situations where a dealer will just guess that a buyer can qualify without actually finding out. This might be the case if someone wants to buy a car on a weekend when banks are closed.

However, if something falls through with the financing on the dealership’s end of the bargain, they can restructure the entire deal. This means that they might raise the rates that a customer signed the paperwork for or change the price of the vehicle and lower the value of the buyer’s trade in. When push comes to shove, buyers might not be able to do anything about this tactic that incentivizes dealers to act poorly. With such incentives, who knows if a dealer even filed the financing paperwork at all?

This time, we learn the story of a customer who dealt with a dealer that was egregiously bad when it came to their yo-yo tactics. After the customer traded in their vehicle, the dealer never secured financing for the customer. After dragging their customer through the mud and cornering them to agree to a deal that was worse for the customer, everything was signed, sealed, and delivered, or show the customer thought.

This was when the dealership tried doing the same thing a second time at which point the customer put their foot down and the dealership decided to have the car repossessed. To make matters much worse, the customer’s trade-in was already sold and they were left without a car.

If this story doesn’t make you sick to your stomach, you might want to take a look in the mirror.

Below, Steve Lehto describes the details of such a situatioon and tries to give a little bit of a fair warning for people who are thinking of doing business with a dealer that might not have their best interest in mind.