50 Shades Of Scammer

This was related to me by someone I knew back in the 1970s; it took place around 1960. He went to a local new car dealer to look into buying a car. As part of that process, the salesman suggested that they take his car to the service bay so an appraisal could be done for trade-in value purposes. He wound up not liking the final purchase price, so he decided to not buy anything. That’s when things got weird.

They claimed they didn’t have his car. The salesman, who had taken his keys to hand off to the service person who took the car around back for the appraisal, tried claiming that this didn’t happen, and told him that he’d probably need to just buy a car.

He called the police via payphone. When they arrived, he told them what had happened. They addressed the salesman, asking him where the car and the keys were. When the salesman tried to claim he never received any keys, they started to arrest him, at which point the salesman admitted to receiving the keys and handing them off to someone else.

The police informed him that unless he could find the person he had handed the keys off to, he’d be arrested. The rest of the search for the “missing” car took place out of sight of my friend — the police told him to remain where he was while they went looking — but the police just kept doing the same thing until they finally found someone willing to take them to the car rather than be arrested.

Shady car dealers have been with us a long time.