THIS IS NOT A STORY ASKING ABOUT, OR BOASTING ABOUT, VIRTUE OR MORALITY. Clear enough?
Two questions:
could the salesman have been on the hook, at least on the short term (i.e., he was responsible for getting the money back). I guess nobody has an actual answer, only guesses. I always assumed it very likely, the only alternative being the financing officer.
Would it be a fireable oversight? That only makes sense if getting the shortfall was a difficult thing.
Somewhat as an extension of that, is it feasible that in the extremely rare and unlikely scenario that this were to happen again to anyone else - the dealership giving you the title and keys to a car, PLUS ALL PAPERWORK SAYING THEY WERE SATISFIED, come after you later saying “wait, one more thing”. I think not.
All the replies to the contrary are presupposing obvious fraud, which at a minimum couldn’t have been planned ahead of time without collusion from the salesman.
You have minimal proof. Their proof will outweigh yours. An accountant testifying will make your measly proof worthless. And once again, you will be asked how you paid. If you say a cashier’s check you’ll have to say from what bank and their records can be subpoenaed and it will show the check wasn’t cashed and it can be cancelled and re-issued. Or you can commit perjury or be in contempt for refusing to answer.
And yes, they have a legal right to demand proof that you paid. That’s how civil suits work. And it’s not money they can’t find, it’s money you didn’t pay and you owe it to them. A judge can order you to produce any evidence that he or she considers relevant to the case. And yes they can go around dunning people for double payment, it’s done all the time. But only an idiot would take you to court if you did pay. But in this case it’s not double payment because YOU DIDN"T PAY!!
You don’t seem to understand that a receipt and a title aren’t proof. They’re evidence. And in this case it is fraudulent evidence, not proof in any way because…
YOU DIDN’T PAY!!
No. He’s not a party to the contract, and he doesn’t have the car. He didn’t even sell the car, he’s the seller’s agent. The F&I person will not be responsible either, nor the cashier, because the responsibility is yours alone.
Upon the day’s reconciliation, your payment would be missing. I’m not sure why you think the missing cash or check could not be traced directly to your purchase.
They gave all of that to you in good faith, because you had a contract. Nothing they have done (or not done) here absolves you of the responsibility to pay for the car - not just show up with a check in your pocket, actually make the payment and satisfy your obligation.
There was no attempted theft. This scenario is analogous to them receiving a check but losing/destroying it. The funds were withdrawn from his account & deposited to the bank’s account, who then wrote a check payable to the car dealership. The customer doesn’t have use of the funds anymore.
Let’s change the OP’s scenario only slightly. The car was purchased in either the Spring or Fall, on an exceptionally cold/warm day. The OP ended up with the check still in his pocket; however, it was the last day he wore that jacket for the season. When the dealer calls him to say we don’t have your check, he checks the jacket he thinks he was wearing that day but there’s no check in it. he tells them it’s their problem, especially because he’s taking his new car & leaving for vacation in the morning to drive across the country.
The only way there could possibly be theft charges is if he takes the check back to the bank & asks them to void it & recredit the $25m back to his bank account, or the scenario I posited, where he gets his buddy to go in the next day & use his check to purchase a second vehicle.
Unless his buddy sings, the OP would get away with it despite what TriPolar thinks.
He withdrawal/transfers funds to his bank’s account
Bank writes a cashiers check to the dealer
Dealer cashes said check
There’s no way a judge or jury would think that this is anything other than sloppy bookkeeping by the dealership as the papertrail would be in his favor.
He’s absolutely going to get caught and cashing the check himself is evidence of fraud, not just a mistake. You seem to think the dealership is going to consider $25,000 to be loose change lost in the couch cushions. One of the first things they’ll do is call the police because the check may have been stolen by one of their employees. Just in investigating that they’re going to question the OP about how he paid for the car, and if he doesn’t tell them the truth he’s building up the evidence of fraud against himself.
I agree basically with those saying OP’s idea is off base. The proof that you paid for something isn’t that you received it…it’s actual proof you paid for it if that’s disputed. 99+% of the time that’s not disputed which might lead to misconception that your receipt of the merchandise is the proof you paid. But it’s really not.
In some cases one could think up it might be hard for a seller to prove they weren’t paid. Like potentially cash, especially a smaller amount and especially in a peer to peer transaction. The other real world factor that hasn’t been mentioned is the inherently greater credibility a merchant will have saying they weren’t paid than a consumer insisting they paid but not being able/willing to offer proof. That would be a more even situation peer to peer. IOW somebody selling a used car privately for cash and forgetting to collect the cash before signing everything and waving goodbye as the buyer drove away might actually lose that money if the buyer acted like a dick and couldn’t be reasoned with or intimidated into relenting, and was willing to go all the way to lying in small claims court saying he did actually pay.
A new car transaction with a dealer? No way. You’d have to prove sooner or later you really did pay. Which I guess is the central dispute, do you really have to show that? Yes. And obviously if you got a refund on a cashiers check it proves you didn’t pay. Not really much better if you can’t show money going out of a checking account on personal check or electronic xfer to the dealer. Again cash can be more dicey for a seller but a dealer is going to have more than one person saying the opposite of what you say.
On what happens to the people who screw up and let a customer walk out with merchandise they agreed to pay for without paying for it, that’s sloppy and unprofessional. Do enough sloppy, unprofessional things, without offsetting them with special achievements, and you get fired. But again it’s not as if merchants are really at risk to losing the proceeds on big ticket purchases where the customer signed a contract saying they’d pay X, which is what you do at a new car dealer.
In NY. the employer can’t make deductions from wages for employer losses such as breakage or cash shortages. I suppose it’s theoretically possible to sue the salesman/financing officer under certain circumstances, but I doubt a single oversight under these circumstances has much chance of being successful/worthwhile. They could require one of them to try to try to get the payment from you, but that’s really going to be the extent of them 'being on the hook" for the money
Does the salesman have a contract ( union or otherwise)? Most likely no, so he absolutely could be fired. Even if he was able to get the shortfall from you.
Your scenario would go like this: Car dealer: ::dials PD:: Hello PD, we can’t find a check for a customer we just gave a car to after he filled out all of the paperwork. PD: Didja check the trash can? ::hangs up::
The fatal flaw in your argument is that sloppy procedures by a car dealership is not a criminal act by a customer. IF the customer does nothing & the check remains uncashed he has a new car & no longer has access to his funds. Why would anyone think anything other than the dealership lost his check?
Where did I suggest he cash the check himself? Hint, I didn’t. What I said was the only way to make use of that check would be to give it to someone else to go buy a car the next day. If it were me giving it to someone else (it wouldn’t be), I’d make damned sure they had a fake ID with a phony address.
In that scenario, I bought a car, I got a cashier’s check, the dealership cashed said cashier’s check. I have a new car & dealership got the funds from my check.
Even if I did give it to my ‘associate’ I’d have a very simple defense as no one would believe the scenario I posited; it’s no different than if I gave them my check, they dropped it on the ground & some other guy picked it up & used it to buy his new car. Why would anyone suspect that I did something nefarious?
The problem with your argument is that you don’t know what you are talking about.
There is no way to use one check to buy two cars and not leave a paper trail that reveals what happened. No hare-brained scheme is going to get around that. The dealership won’t be calling the police to say they lost the check, they’re calling to say that fraud occurred and you refuse to pay for the car you received. The only result of your scheme your ‘associate’ will face criminal charges along with you. And when the police visit him he’s going become incredibly cooperative so he doesn’t end up in jail with you.
The problem, I think ,in this case is that it appears all the paperwork was done as if **robardin ** had paid in full on Saturday. On Monday, when **robardin** returned to pick up the car it was registered, had plates, had been retitled.I have never bought a car from a dealer that would register and change the title before getting full payment (either in cash or the proceeds from a loan) , in part because changing the title requires a bill of sale ( which was probably in the pile of papers eight years ago). A bill of sale is functionally a receipt. When the dealer sues **robardin **for the payment, it's the dealer who has the burden of proof, not the other way around. So here comes the dealer, who says he didn't get paid. Here comes **robardin ** , who has the title in his name, the bill of sale that says he paid and the keys to the car. Unless **robardin** admits they didn't ask for the check, it's going to be hard for me to believe the dealership did all of that without being paid. Maybe the payment was credited to some other customer, or maybe it fell behind the drawer in the financing officers desk and is still sitting there months later.
So what if it fell behind a drawer? It’s not money. Why would you be entitled to $25k worth of car for free just because someone dropped a $10 piece of paper (or whatever a cashier’s check costs) behind a drawer? Is this the “losers weepers” corollary to the “finders keepers” law some people seem to want for the car?
Now, it probably costs money to cancel a cashier’s check and get a new one issued, and it probably takes time, and maybe you won’t be in town to do all that for a week or two, so the dealer would probably have to eat all of that.
Here’s what the CFPB says about when you pay for something with a check and it gets lost by the seller:
The loss of a cashier’s check is way more complicated than the loss of a personal check, but I don’t know why the answer would be any different once that complexity was dealt with.
I didn’t say he was entitled to the car for free. I said the dealer has to prove he didn’t pay, which is going to be difficult or impossible when he has a bill of sale saying he did pay, the dealer retitled the car in his name and the dealer handed him the keys. Now, if the dealer acknowledged that they received the check and lost it, and the lawsuit is really about the buyer not cooperating with obtaining a replacement check, that may go differently because that would account for the bill of sale etc.
And lawsuits don’t always work out the way they should. Watch any of those court reality shows - there are frequently cases where people claim they paid in cash and didn’t receive or lost a receipt. They lose - even though it’s indeed possible that they did pay and didn’t get a receipt.
Again this comes down to asserting that proof you received merchandise (the title on the car and keys are part of what you’re buying) is proof you paid for the merchandise. But it’s not.
And the specific hole in the last part of that argument is that the buyer can’t have a windfall unless they get a refund from the bank on the cashiers check. If you really give a cashiers check to a car dealer and they forget to deposit it, that money remains in the bank’s account, not your problem but not your windfall either. The bank removes the money from your acct when they issue the check. If you return the check you can get a refund, but then there’s a record you did that.
So the scenario relies on some idea the authorities wouldn’t investigate your financial records after being presented testimony and records from the dealer saying they weren’t paid. But they will. They will take multi-employee testimony and records of an established car dealer as sufficient reason to do that investigating. In a private dispute they might have more in mind the possibility the complainant is a kook. But even if I were Smith buying a car privately from Jones and Jones forgot to take payment after after giving me all my deliverables, I wouldn’t hold out much hope for keeping the money if I had to get a refund on a cashiers check. Again with cash, in a one on one he said/he said, maybe.
You’re forgetting about the bill of sale- which is absolutely proof that you paid.
I didn’t say anything about a windfall. And see my response above- if the dealer acknowledges receiving and losing the check and says the buyer won’t cooperate with getting a replacement, that’s a very different issue than saying they were never paid at all.
I don’t know why people think that a receipt or a title or anything else is ‘proof’ of a payment that was never made. There is no proof that a payment was made in this case because it wasn’t made.
No, it’s evidence that you paid. And it’s going to stand next to all the other evidence (probably easily obtained and clear as day) showing that the dealer never got the money.
Why is it so different? If they never had the check, they haven’t been paid, but if they lose the check, they still haven’t been paid because the cashier’s check isn’t money. They haven’t been paid until they have the money.
Which evidence is that? The dealer saying you didn’t pay, but he gave you a bill of sale and the title and the keys anyway?
It’s different because the dealer who says you never gave him any form of payment but he gave you the title, bill of sale, and keys anyway is going to have a credibility problem that the one who says you did give him the check but he lost it doesn’t have. Remember he has the burden of proof when he sues , and he has to prove the buyer didn’t pay. If the judge/jury doesn’t believe the seller when he claims he gave you all those things without receiving any payment from you , that’s the end of the story.
Let’s take this away from a car dealer selling a car. Let’s make it instead a mechanic who is suing me for not paying for my repairs to my car. He doesn’t say he lost the check I gave him, or that I stopped payment or that I did a chargeback on the credit card I used to pay him. He says I never gave him any form of payment- nothing changed hands, not cash , not a check, not a credit card. But when I picked up the car one of his employees gave me a receipt that say “paid in full” along with my keys. You’re on the jury - who wins? And if you say the mechanic, please explain how I could possibly prove I paid if the “paid in full receipt” isn’t sufficient - because if I paid in cash there won’t be any another evidence that I paid.