I received a cold call from "Lisa Lee" of One Stop Motors, concerning selling a car I had advertised in local papers and Autotrader.in a follow-up call, Lisa handed the phone off to "Jim". Of course, by the second call, I had specific questions because I had already read several consumer complaints, and I finally told Jim that I didn't want to do business with the One Stop Motors.
I used the all of the information I had gathered about the company to construct a business plan, which I believe is the way One Stop Motors operates:
How to collect $500 bills for advertising private auto sales without ever having to sell a car...
Use prospective customers' greed to overcome common sense by insinuating you can sell their car for thousands of dollars over asking price and actual value because you can arrange financing.
Assert that you will advertise the car until it's sold, and propose that if you weren't able to sell cars you would lose money in continuing advertising (knowing that noone will try to sell for longer than a few months - the car will either be sold by other means for much less than you list it, or the customer will simply give up and keep it).
Offer to return your fee if the car is sold by other means in the first 30 days (the fine print says it has to sell for your inflated listing price - practically an impossibility).
Direct potential customers to search Yahoo for the keywords "classic corvette" to show how your listing shows up in a top-of-list, paid, position (and hope they don't try other common-sense searches like "1965 corvette for sale" or "buy classic corvette", which won't return your ad at all, or at least not in the first 10 pages or so).
If the customer offers to pay you extra commission on your inflated listing, but only after the sale, reply that you can't do that because you're an advertising business, and not licensed as an auto dealer (because you know there is no way you're going to sell the car at your price).
Don't make any genuine guarantees, just insinuate assurances, and sit back and rake in $500 bills from greedy and/or gullible customers.
0 comments