Examples of closers at Fremont-Toyota include Abby Sho­koor and Naqib Halimi. For re­la­ted stories, see the statements by Brian Martin and Sam Pawar.

Remember this part.

Before you go to buy a car, memorize this rule: Nobody enforces laws re­la­ted to fraud by businesses, even felony fraud, except in special cases.

The rule applies to most large business transactions. Not just auto sales.

There are four special cases. Fraud by businesses usually has con­se­quen­ces if and only if:

(1) The victim is rich or influential
(2) A case looks unusually profitable to an attorney
(3) Somebody in power is embarrassed
(4) In the modern age, if a case goes viral on the Internet

If your case doesn't qualify, the business is probably going to get away with it. That's how it works in the U.S. and in most countries.

If you Google a deal­er­ship, you might find civil or criminal cases that they lost. You could say, “What about these cases?”

Fair enough. But the ques­tion to ask is, “If a business lies dur­ing a sale or commits loan fraud, what usually happens?”

What usually happens is that they'll take your money, laugh, and move on to the next mark. Note: “mark” is an English word for the victim of a scam.

You, and only you, can protect yourself.

The District Attorney isn't going to prosecute unless there's a documented pattern of misconduct so serious that it would be awkward to ignore it.

Lawyers won't do it. For auto sales, the lender won't do it. Police won't do it.

Even police *at* the lender won't do it. :-) Ally Financial collaborates with Fremont-Toyota on loan fraud, and they have a senior former police officer, Todd Wolf, at the top of the organization. Mr. Wolf isn't embarrassed at all.

Never buy from a deal­er­ship that has a history of fraud or abuse of dif­fer­ent types. This includes Fremont-Toyota of Fremont, Cal­i­for­nia. The rhyme to re­mem­ber is: Stay away or be prey.

Be sus­pi­cious of every deal­er­ship regardless of history unless you trust a particular sales-per­son.
इतिहास की परवाह किए बिना हर डीलरशिप पर संदेह करें जब तक कि आप किसी विशेष विक्रेता पर भरोसा न करें।

If you trust a particular sales-per­son and be­lieve that they won't take advantage of you, deal with them to the extent pos­si­ble. Assume that everybody else sees you the way that a shark sees a seal.

Rollbacks:

A rollback is a car that a buyer return­ed very shortly after a sale. It counts as a used car even if it was a new car that was used only for a few hours.

One problem with a rollback is that new cars lose thousands of dollars in depreciation as soon as they're driven off of the lot. So, if dealer­ships are trying to sell you a rollback, they're sup­posed to tell you right up front.

Beware. Some dealer­ships won't tell you until the end. Or they may not tell you at all.

Kokku Naidu says:

I was jobless be­cause of the pandemic. I found a job but my Toyota Camry need­ed work so that I could get start­ed.

I went to Fremont-Toyota to have the Camry repaired. The sales staff told me that I should buy a new car instead.

The staff showed me a electric car, a Toyota Mirai, and said that it came with a gas card for free. They add­ed that this model had lim­it­ed availability be­cause Toyota had problems getting the chip need­ed to manufacture it.

One strange part was that the sales­people said, “If you're going to travel, go to a Toyota deal­er­ship and rent a car for that, be­cause you won't find charging stations for this model”.

I wasn't sure about the purchase. I should have walked away but the sales­people didn't seem to want me to let leave. They pressured me for sever­al hours. In the end, I agreed to trade-in my Camry and take the Mirai in its place.

At the end, right be­fore we took the keys, the “manager” that we were talking to at the time said, “Did anybody happen to tell you, this car is a rollback?”

It was shocking to hear this at the end. We'd been at the deal­er­ship for an entire afternoon, the sales­people had talked for hours about how we should buy this car, and nobody had said a word about it being a rollback.