Car dealer deceived consumers & falsified info

Shopping for a car can be exciting. But wading through ads and promotions from car dealers, and deciding how to pay, can make it stressful.

If you decide to finance the car, you have two options: get a loan from a bank, credit union, or finance company, or get dealership financing. Either way, the financing application requires an honest listing of your monthly income and the amount of your down payment.

But not all dealers play by the rules. In a case announced today, the FTC alleges that Tate’s Auto Center of Winslow, Inc. — as well as related dealerships in Arizona and New Mexico and their owner and manager, Richard Berry — used deceptive advertising to get people in the door, failed to disclose required financing terms, and frequently falsified consumers’ income and down payment information in an effort to close the deal. Instead of using the income information people gave, Tate’s often inflated numbers to make it look like people had higher monthly incomes.

The next time you’re deciding how to pay for a new set of wheels, take your time.

• Carefully read the documents, especially the credit or lease contract.
• Ask to review your final financing application. Make sure it shows your real income, down payment, and other personal information.
• Be sure all the terms, including the price and the financing, are what you agreed to. Understand them before you sign.

Read Our Privacy Act Statement

It is your choice whether to submit a comment. If you do, you must create a user name, or we will not post your comment. The Federal Trade Commission Act authorizes this information collection for purposes of managing online comments. Comments and user names are part of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) public records system, and user names also are part of the FTC’s computer user records system. We may routinely use these records as described in the FTC’s Privacy Act system notices. For more information on how the FTC handles information that we collect, please read our privacy policy.

Read Our Comment Policy

The purpose of this blog and its comments section is to inform readers about Federal Trade Commission activity, and share information to help them avoid, report, and recover from fraud, scams, and bad business practices. Your thoughts, ideas, and concerns are welcome, and we encourage comments. But keep in mind, this is a moderated blog. We review all comments before they are posted, and we won’t post comments that don’t comply with our commenting policy. We expect commenters to treat each other and the blog writers with respect.

• We won’t post off-topic comments, repeated identical comments, or comments that include sales pitches or promotions.
• We won’t post comments that include vulgar messages, personal attacks by name, or offensive terms that target specific people or groups.
• We won’t post threats, defamatory statements, or suggestions or encouragement of illegal activity.
• We won’t post comments that include personal information, like Social Security numbers, account numbers, home addresses, and email addresses. To file a detailed report about a scam, go to ReportFraud.ftc.gov.

We don't edit comments to remove objectionable content, so please ensure that your comment contains none of the above. The comments posted on this blog become part of the public domain. To protect your privacy and the privacy of other people, please do not include personal information. Opinions in comments that appear in this blog belong to the individuals who expressed them. They do not belong to or represent views of the Federal Trade Commission.