Yet another scam!
I am a car salesperson and have been for 15 years, I have been with Rolls-Royce for a majority of that time.
I received a phone call about four years ago from a man in South Carolina; he asked if I had the ability to contact the owner of a car that our company had sold new. I said I could but I was not allowed to divulge any information due to privacy laws. The man had a desperate tone to his voice so I inquired as to why he needed to contact the owner of this car? He gave me his story which unfortunately came with a bad ending.
This man had been dreaming of owning a Rolls-Royce for many years and he had worked hard to save the money. This particular car was for sale at a local dealership that mainly dealt with vintage Porsches and had been in the process of growing their latest business which was a 356 replica that ran on battery power. They had managed to consign a 1973 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow and this man from South Carolina had seen the car online and entered in to negotiations with the dealer. They agreed to a price of $25,000.00 delivered to him in South Carolina. This transaction happened in May of 2011. I received the desperate phone call in late July of 2011. It turns out they had been "waiting for the owner to sign the release paperwork and that they could not release the car until the owner of the car finalized the sale". Apparently there had been many phone calls similar to this where the dealer kept dragging out the delivery. Finally in a last ditch effort the buyer reached out to me and this is where things got interesting. I was able to look up the current owner’s information since he was also a service customer; so I knew that I could contact him. I asked the man from South Carolina to forward all the correspondence and documents to me, which he did via fax, I needed proof. The fax contained a canceled cashier’s check, a sales contract and back and forth communication regarding the details of the sale. The cashier’s check was deposited on May 31st. which was verified by the time stamp on the back of the check. This gave me enough reason to call the owner of the car.
I reached the owner, he said that he indeed had his Rolls-Royce for sale and the dealership had a buyer; but there were some issues on final payment and a minor disagreement on what transportation company to use and the buyer had not paid them for the transportation. I asked the owner to come to my office and showed him the canceled cashier’s check, the contract, and the correspondence. He was shocked and asked what he should do? I said that he needs to go get his car and find out what the heck was happening with the transaction and where the money went. He did just that, he walked in, saw the owner’s wife, who was also the business manager, and asked her if the car was sold, she said yes; so he inquired about the money, she admitted that they no longer had the money and that it had been spent. He called me in a bit of a panic and asked what he should do next and I said that he should pull the car out and go to the police, which he did.
Unfortunately for the man in South Carolina the money was gone and other than filling a report with his local police and the Fountain Valley police there was really nothing they could do.
About a week later a Porsche friend, sent me a PDF of the local Porsche Club Newsletter with his 993 on the cover, he had won an award at the local Porsche Concours. I scrolled through the newsletter and found an ad from the same dealership that absconded with the $25,000.00 from the Rolls-Royce sale. I quickly called my Porsche friend to tell him the story about this man in South Carolina and how this dealership had stolen his money. I insisted that the Porsche Owner’s Club didn’t want anything to do with this dealership; so my friend called the chapter president who agreed to yank the ad and proceeded to tell him a similar story with a Porsche that was consigned there as well, this time the money had not only been spent; but the car had also been delivered out of state to the new owner. A few weeks went by and more stories came out of customer cars missing parts and other transactions that had gone bad. The dealership is now out of business and the owners are now on to the next scam. It is a shame since these are the sort of people that give the good guys a bad name.
