Theoretical questions to dealers, and people involved with dealership operations.
I`ve run into in interesting situation, when funded deal and copy of the contract on file with financial institution is significantly different from one, I signed and have a hard copy of. Although in general changes are beneficial to me, I’m struggling to imagine how these could have been made without forging my signature.
What I believe happened:
I signed a deal early February, it’s been a long delay until its funded, new incentives seem to arrive in meanwhile.
Dealer submitted a contract almost a month later for funding with the same monthly payment, but new sign date, new sale price, new incentives.
As a net result I have ~3 extra weeks of the lease for “free”, but the idea of a dealer altering paperwork behind my back is unsettling. Most likely not going to do anything, as I’m pretty happy with numbers I got, and I would have easily re-signed that contract if approached but feel like it’s not ok.
Question: is it normal?
P.S. Not going to disclose dealer, manager, etc. Would just mention it’s Nissan Ariya.
They took the path to least resistance. It doesn’t make it right, but you need to ask yourself if it’s worth the unending calls from likely their corporate office, an angry dealer, and the finance company. If you want to fight that fight, good on you for it. If not, can understand the desire to not want it to be your problem since you were not harmed. Make no mistake… that was wrong.
When signing paperwork at a dealership, one of the many documents you may be asked to sign is a limited power of attorney. I’m not saying that they should have taken the liberty to do so but my best guess is that since there was no material change that would have a negative effect or give you pause that they elected to use their power of attorney in order to fix whatever may have caused the holdup in contract funding.
Yeah that’s what my first thought was too;) among a bunch of documents I might have signed a power of attorney to get me a license plate etc., but does it really extend to singing new contracts if previous one failed to fund at no fault of my own?
I don’t even think there was any malicious intent by the dealer he might have failed to file for some reason and missed the window accidentally, I would assume no one would gamble on getting better or worse incentives next month etc.
I’m not a lawyer but I would say that it shouldn’t, unless it explicitly said so. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t view it that way somehow. They probably should have reached out to you regardless.
How would you have felt if the dealer re-wrote the deal to pocket some incentive you would have otherwise been entitled to receive? Not saying it happens…
BMW won’t help you and say that dealers are independent
BMWFS won’t help you because dealers are independent
There is nothing that you can do about the forgery from BMW perspective and they won’t help you. You can file a lawsuit where you will drain your time/energy.
Nothing happened to the dealer who did this to me. The finance Manager(Actual forger) is still working for them.
I did report them. I did spoke to couple attorneys and they said nothing can be done about it. However, I did find an attorney who was working on a case againt the same dealership as there were doing this often. I tried to hep his case with my testimonial but not sure what came out of that.
I did a bit of a digging and I believe the power of attorney I signed might have entitled them to correct financial paperwork related to car purchase on my behalf in case there is some sort of mistake, typo, etc. I don’t have a copy but google says it’s typical to have such language included. I don’t know the real reason why initial deal did not fund. Since I am not harmed, I would barely have a case. In theory I can try voiding the whole contract but it’s not my intention.