Are Car Dealers Scammers?

Most people hate buying cars and for good reasons, dealing with the sales people is rarely pleasant. In almost all cases they will use high pressure sales tactics in order to make the sale. Even worse is that you will occasionally run into scams. This tends to give the impression that all car dealers are scammers. As a rule this is not the case but it does pay to be careful.

In generally car dealers are not outright scammers although a lot of them will use some misleading tactics in order to make the sale. There are of course some bad apples in any line of work and the car sales business is no exception. The problem here is that there is so much room for scams when you are selling cars that the few bad apples do give everybody else a bad name. This gets even worse when you realize that even the honest dealers will push the envelope in order to get the sale.

In most cases what dealers will do is tell you things to put pressure on you to buy right away. This isn't really a scam but it does bother a lot of people. This is when they tell you things like this is the last of that particular model that they have in stock or that they have are offering a special deal if you buy now. The reason that they do this is that car dealers know that if you walk out the door it is very unlikely that you will be back. Therefore they have to make the sale right there and then. This leads to high pressure sales tactics, which most people don't like. While this is irritating it is not really a scam.

The scams when they do happen usually involve the financing of the car since that is the easiest area to do it. Things that you have to watch out for are when the dealer will tell you that you have credit that is worse than it really is so that they can charge you a higher interest rate. In many cases they won't tell you this until after you have bought the car and driven it off the lot, it is only then they will tell you that you didn't qualify for the low interest rate and will have to pay a higher one.

Since most of the scams involve financing your new car the best way to avoid them is to get your financing from the bank rather than the dealer. Although this in itself could lead to scams as many dealers will tell you that they don't accept payment from your bank. If they try to tell you this just go buy the car somewhere else. If you do believe that you are the victim of a scam contact your state's attorney general, they investigate car dealer scams all the time.