Jul 9, 2024
Would you transfer $275,000 to a car dealership without ever seeing the vehicle or meeting with the dealer in person?
Those are exactly the mistakes Alan Sue made when he bought a Mercedes G-Wagon online, sight unseen.
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The 78-year-old Hawaii resident had wired $275,000 to Dream Auto Collection in Hollywood, Florida — yet, he never received the car. Or any car, for that matter.
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When asked by a Local 10 News reporter why he sent money to a complete stranger in another state, Sue responded: “I was stupid and foolish.”
If you’re shopping around for a car, here’s how to make sure you don’t get taken for a ride.
Blinded by a ‘Dream’
Local 10 News investigated how Sue went from sending nearly $300,000 to a car dealership in South Florida to never receiving a vehicle.
The car in question was a 2023 Mercedes Benz G63 with the rare BRABUS package. Sue explained that it was his dream car and he had been searching for one for years.
When he saw it on the Dream Auto Collection website in April, he called the dealership right away to buy it — even though he lived 4,770 miles away in Hawaii. He showed Local 10 News a stamped bill of sale from Dream Auto Collection and money wire records.
Yet, Sue soon realized that the Mercedes never reached the San Diego port to ship it out to Hawaii. Nobody from the dealership responded to Sue’s frantic emails, texts and phone calls about the shipping delay.
“It sounded so good,” he said. “They made everything sound so nice.”
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It’s easy to get excited when you spot your dream car online, but more often than not, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Going in person to check out a car is always the better option — if only to ensure that it actually exists before making such a major financial decision.
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What happened next
Local 10 News went to Dream Auto Collection to get some answers for Sue. The president of Dream Auto Collection, Oleg Tyulenev, refused to answer any of the news outlets' questions.
This isn’t the first time Local 10 News visited Tyulenev. Last year, a senior Georgia couple sent the dealership $15,000 for a rare Lexus that they never received.
It turned out that Dream Auto Collection had sold the Lexus to someone else. The couple never got a refund until after they contacted Local 10 News and reported the scam.
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“We have been here before,” Local 10 News journalist, Jeff Weinsier, told Tyulenev. “Do you think you are going to get away with this?”
A half hour after the news outlet showed up, Tyulenev called Sue and said there was a mixup and he had accidentally sold the Mercedes G-Wagon to someone else. He promised he would issue Sue a refund for the car.
It pays to do research on auto dealerships. If Sue had done a quick Google search on Dream Auto Collection before transferring his money, he would have seen the story about the Georgia couple getting ripped off.
Then, he could have avoided shelling out his hard-earned money for a car that possibly didn’t even exist in the first place.
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Sabina Wex is a writer and podcast producer in Toronto. Her work has appeared in Business Insider, Fast Company, CBC and more.
