On 7/10/04, my fiance and I went to Windham Chevrolet in Quitman, Texas to look at cars. A few days earlier, Gary had received a Pre-Approval letter in the mail supposedly guaranteeing him that he was pre-approved for a car loan. Since he has a bad credit history, he followed the instructions on the letter to "activate the pre-approval amount", and spoke to representative Kristie Langley. He told her that he usually got turned down on car loans because of his credit history and wanted to verify the legitimacy of the pre-approval letter. She assured him that his credit would not be a factor and that the pre-approval letters were only sent out to potential customers who had a certain credit score and that he must have met that score or he wouldn't have received the letter.
When we got to the dealership, salesman Mickey Vogt showed us a few cars and let us test drive one of them. After the test drive, Gary mentioned that he had received one of their pre-approval letters and Mr. Vogt made no response.in the office, he did the paperwork to appraise our trade-in and proceeded to fill out a credit application. Gary mentioned again that we had a pre-approval letter and Mr. Vogt again did not seem to care. After running a credit check, he told Gary, as expected, that due to his credit history he would not be able to help him with a car loan. Gary told him about the conversation he had had with Kristie Langley, and Mr. Vogt brushed it off and said that if Ms. Langley had known about the bad credit she would have advised him that a trip to the dealership would have been a waste of time. He did not seem to wish to discuss the matter any further, and we left.
This pre-approval letter scam is deceptive advertising at the very least, as there was nothing in the "fine print" to indicate that we were not guaranteed to be financed. The only thing in the fine print about credit stated, "Credit severity may affect down payment, " but we were brushed off long before we ever got to that point.
This was my first experience with one of these pre-approval letters, which I had always assumed were legitimate... But not at Windham Chevrolet!
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