Dealer sold mentally feeble man 18 cars in 14 months
Saturday, August 17, 2002
By JULIA ANDERSON, Columbian staff writer
A Vancouver car dealer who sold a mentally impaired man 18 cars in 14 months last year has agreed to pay $32,000 in civil fines and attorney fees after an investigation by the Washington state Office of the Attorney General.
The conclusions of the case were filed in Clark County Superior Court on Friday.
According to state attorneys, the dealer, A&D Auto Sales, doing business as Vancouver Mazda/Dodge, allegedly violated the state's Consumer Protection Act by misrepresenting trade-in values and lease terms in the transactions and by misrepresenting the optional nature of various financing and insurance products available to consumers.
The transactions "depleted the man's retirement savings," investigators said.
Pretended to be his friend
According to state documents, the dealership's managers and sales people pretended to befriend the 69-year-old man in order to get him to buy vehicles at retail prices and then trade them in days or weeks later at lower, wholesale prices.
Meantime, said state investigators, the dealership kept the difference.
In order to build trust and make the man believe they were his friend, dealership staff provided the man with a monogrammed director's chair in the dealership's showroom and treated him to dinner while secretly using his money to pay for everyone's dinner, state investigators said.
Separate settlement
Ron Anderson, the dealership's principal owner, said this week he ordered the car sales stopped when after six months of aberrant behavior the dealership's general manager told him what was going on. Anderson said he should have recognized the problem much sooner.
The settlement with the Office of the Attorney General is separate from a private settlement between the dealership and the man's Vancouver lawyer, Sam Gunn, that restored the man's savings and left him with a new vehicle. Gunn was not available for comment Friday.
If you don't have the time to do something right, where are you going to find the time to fix it?
-Stephen King
