‘Looked so legitimate’: Scammers pose as Nebraska car dealers, cheat buyers out of thousands

James Wood wasn’t feeling safe at his own north Lincoln car lot.

A cop had called him in mid-November, wondering what had happened to the $45,000 a Pennsylvania family had wired for a 2017 Lexus.

No Lexus here, Wood told him.

A few days later, a rental car pulled up to his lot. The driver had flown from Florida to pick up an $85,000 Land Rover his friend had bought, sight-unseen, over the internet.

“I said, ‘What Land Rover?’ He said, ‘The one you sold us.’”

The man showed Wood his phone. Is this your website? Is this your number?

“I said ‘no.’ And he started looking very disappointed.”

Wood heard next from the would-be Lexus-buyer herself, and then from the Nebraska auto dealer licensing board. And he began putting the pieces together:

Someone, somewhere, probably in another country, was posing online as James Wood of Specialty Auto in Lincoln, Nebraska, using a sophisticated website to market high-priced phantoms — like the Lexus and the Land Rover, but also a $230,000 Porsche, a $210,000 Bentley and a $118,000 Audi — and scam car-shoppers around the country.

The real James Wood fills his lot with affordable imports he finds at auction. Beetles, Civics, Jettas. 

Last year, he didn’t move anything for more than $20,000.

“Once in a while, I sell a Mercedes or a Volvo, but they’re not high-end. They’re older.”

Wood doesn’t even have a website for his car lot. And that’s likely how it got caught up in this con, he learned. 

Every year, state regulators field multiple reports of scammers appropriating the identities of small Nebraska dealers, usually mom-and-pops with little or no online presence. Dealers in Newman Grove, Grand Island and Omaha were all unwitting victims in the last several years, according to the state.

Wood knew he’d gotten lucky. The man from Florida left the lot without his friend’s Land Rover or his friend’s money — and also without a fight. 

But Wood worried he might not be lucky the next time.

“There was about a week I basically just drove by, stopped to feed the stray cats that I feed, and left.”

***

With their Ford Flex turning 10 and its repair bills mounting, Adrianna and Rob Parsons started looking for a replacement.

The Doylestown, Pennsylvania, couple considered several SUVs but had narrowed their search.

“My husband, in the worst way, wanted me to have a Lexus,” Adrianna said. “He planned to have a big red bow and balloons inside, I learned later.”

They’d test-driven one at a New Jersey dealership. It was a quiet, comfortable car. They liked its third-row seating for their daughters, its V8 for Adrianna. 

“He knows I like the horsepower,” she said.

Rob Parsons started searching online and, through CarFax, found a dark blue 2017 LX 570 with 45,000 miles for just $45,000 — a better price than similar, lower-mileage models they’d browsed.

But it was 1,200 miles away, in Nebraska, according to the CarFax post.

“We were super nervous to purchase a vehicle from another state,” Adrianna Parsons said. “This was new territory for us.”

They clicked through to Specialty’s website, where they found multiple photos of the Lexus, its VIN and CarFax history. They found other high-end cars — six-figure cars — photographed against the same backdrops. They found the seller’s number and name. James Wood.

“It all looked so legitimate,” she said.

They shared the listing with a friend who works for a Lexus dealer. He approved. Looks like a good car and a good price, he told them.

The first time Adrianna Parsons spoke to the seller, she heard what she thought was a Russian accent, though he said he was from Budapest. 

It gave her a slight pause. “I thought: ‘What’s a guy with an accent like this doing with a name like James Wood, living and selling cars in Nebraska?’”

But then she remembered the repairman fixing her garage door. He was born Yakov but did business as Jacob. She thought: Maybe this Wood felt he had to Americanize his name, too?

In the week after finding the Lexus, she estimated she spoke to the fake Wood four or five times, and also communicated by text and email. She was growing more comfortable; she asked about his children, he asked about hers.

Still, $45,000 was a lot for the couple — enough that they were tapping their home equity for a line of credit to pay for the Lexus. So she did even more due diligence, and sent the purchase agreement to a cousin with experience buying vehicles before seeing them.

Her cousin suggested three pre-sale conditions. That the seller provide a picture of the paper title, not just a digital version they’d seen; that he send a video of the Lexus starting and running; and that he put the $45,000 in escrow until the Lexus was parked in their Doylestown driveway.

Sure, the seller said. He’d get them a copy of the title. Then he sent a video of a dark Lexus LX570 starting up and idling for 30 seconds.

And that turned Adrianna Parsons into a believer. She didn’t need to suggest the escrow. They’d done their homework. They trusted CarFax. They saw a copy of the dealer license. Now they saw the Lexus in action, purring.

“I caved. I thought, ‘He has it, we’re fine and I need to get over it.’”

Her father-in-law wired the money from his account to the seller’s Wells Fargo account Nov. 14. The couple reimbursed him that same day.

The seller gave them a Nov. 20 delivery date, the driver’s contact information and a copy of the CarFax post now marked as pending.

It all looked settled. Until Nov. 20, when the car didn’t arrive, the driver couldn’t be reached and the pending designation disappeared from the CarFax post.

“In the space of the next 35 to 40 minutes,” Parsons said, “we realized we were cooked.”

***

Adrianna Parsons wouldn’t have known to notice the comma missing after the word Lincoln on the fake James Wood’s fake dealer license. Or catch the wrong paper color, or realize a handful of words — like “calendar year” — were absent.

But when the executive director of the Nebraska Motor Vehicle Industry Licensing Board examined the license, he immediately spotted a half-dozen subtle discrepancies.

And it wasn’t the first forgery. “They get creative,” Joshua Eickmeier said. “They’ll send a customer a copy of the dealer license, but I can tell right away the font’s wrong, or the color’s wrong.”

The state agency started seeing the fake dealer scam several years ago, and now hears a handful of complaints annually, he said. The scammers tend to hijack the identities of dealers with lapsed licenses or active dealers without a web presence.

Other common denominators: The scammers load their fake websites with high-end vehicles at too-good-to-be-true prices, especially in the post-pandemic auto market, Eickmeier said.

“And a lot of times, not only are they not in Nebraska, but often they’re not in the country,” he said. “That’s why it’s so difficult for them to be held accountable.”

His agency can’t do much to help scam victims; it only has jurisdiction over legitimate licensees. So it alerts the Better Business Bureau and notifies the Federal Trade Commission, which can shut down — or at least flag — fraudulent websites.

“It’s really unfortunate, but all we can do is encourage customers, especially if they’re purchasing out of state, to do their due diligence,” Eickmeier said. “The best case is to go see the vehicle and make sure it exists.”

The Lexus that Parsons thought she bought did exist — just not in Nebraska. The photos she fell for were taken five years ago at Exotic Motorsports of Oklahoma.

And it wasn’t just the Lexus. All of the images of cars on the fake Specialty Auto website — including the Land Rover, and a Porsche, Audi, Bentley and others — were lifted from the Exotic Motorsports site.

“They’re going through and saving our photos,” said owner Eliud Villarreal. “They’re taking all of our hard work.”

His Oklahoma City-area dealership sold the Lexus in question nearly five years ago, for $60,500, he said.

He and his staff hear about their cars, and their photos, being used to try to con would-be buyers once or twice a month, Villarreal said.

“The scammers are getting very, very good at this. You can’t say, ‘Only buy from dealers,’ because they’re posing as dealers.”

***

In Pennsylvania, Adrianna and Rob Parsons couldn’t fathom their $45,000 could vanish, just like that. 

Irreversible, untraceable.

“We went down a rabbit hole,” Adrianna Parsons said. “I started doing everything in my power. I spent the next seven days buried in it, reporting it and filling out every form I could find.”

They reached out to a police officer friend, who found and called the real James Wood in Lincoln. 

Then she called Wood herself.

She was a little hostile at first, Wood remembered. But then she realized he wasn’t the scammer, that he didn’t even have a website. 

“And she was like 100% going to track these guys down and get them,” Wood said. “I said, ‘I hope you do.’”

After Parsons spoke to Wood, she knew he, too, was a victim. And that he could be vulnerable. She’d called Lincoln police once already, to report the scam, and now she called again to share her concerns about his safety, she said.

“Here he is, a 79-year-old man, and people are physically driving to his place? What if the wrong person pulls up and takes it out on him?”

Wood also called Lincoln police and said he was told the department wouldn’t open a case because he hadn’t lost money. A police spokeswoman could find no record of the call.

Rob Parsons was posting an angry Google review about Specialty Auto when he found another victim — a New Hampshire man who lost $20,000 on the same Lexus SUV.

“He was smarter than us and only gave part of the total,” Adrianna Parsons said.

She reported her loss to police in Lincoln and Doylestown, and to the Nebraska and Pennsylvania attorneys general. She filled out a federal internet fraud complaint form, and then another one, and called the FBI.

Then she drove 40 minutes to their nearest field office. She didn’t leave satisfied. She was told her scammers were likely overseas, she said, and the Bureau doesn’t have the resources to chase them.

“Shouldn’t their job be to protect Americans?” she said. “In my opinion, this is a national security issue if we have Americans getting ripped off.”

She kept hitting walls. When she asked Wells Fargo about getting her money back, she was told the account-holder — the scammer — would have to decide to return it, she said.

She was livid. “So you’re saying the guy who conned me out of $45,000 has to have an attack of conscience and say, ‘I’m a bad person,’ and give it all back?”

A Wells Fargo spokeswoman told the Flatwater Free Press its escalation team was looking into the case — but it couldn’t share any findings with the couple because they’re not the account-holders.

Adrianna Parsons’ communication with CarFax went nowhere, either. 

A consumer affairs staffer encouraged her to try to resolve her loss with the seller. He continued, in an email: “We do value our relationships with CarFax business subscribers (car dealers, financial institutions and others) but we cannot dictate the actions of these subscribers.”

“I was telling them, ‘Your site is being used to rip off Americans,’” she said. “They are the reason we found this fraudulent seller.”

In a statement to Flatwater, the company said if CarFax learns of a fraudulent listing, it kills the post and bans the seller. And it would cooperate with law enforcement investigating the couple’s case, including responding to subpoenas, it said.

***

The fake Specialty Auto website disappeared sometime in December, a few weeks after it was reported, and life returned to normal for the real James Wood.

No more duped and disappointed car-buyers showing up at his lot. No cops calling his phone.

He did hear from Autotrader, which surprised him with an online advertising bill for nearly $1,700. That, too, must have been the scammer’s work, because Wood knew nothing about it; he’d never marketed his cars on that website.

“A lady from their accounting department called me and said, ‘You need to pay this bill.’ I said, ‘I don’t have a bill.’”

He hasn’t heard anything more.

A fake Specialty Auto Facebook page still exists, though the last post was in late October — a photo of a Lexus SUV. And it links to a Facebook page for the fake James Wood, “the happy owner of Specialty Auto.” 

But the photo of the fake Wood was lifted from the online bio of a furniture store owner in Frankfurt, Germany, and the car lot’s phone number is out of service.

In Pennsylvania, Adrianna and Rob Parsons spent months hoping someone — a local cop, a state investigator, a federal agent — would track down the scammer. And they spent most of that time paying more than $500 a month for an empty spot in their driveway.

“When you buy a new car, you expect to have a car loan,” Adrianna Parsons said. “You also expect to have a car.”

They finally heard good news last month — and then got two-thirds of their loss back in their bank account.

Late last year, just before Christmas, their insurance company had rejected their fraud protection claim.

It took several months — and pressure from their lawyer — to convince the company to reverse its decision.

The $30,000 isn’t late-model, low-mileage Lexus money. But it was enough for the couple to relaunch their search, this time closer to home, Adrianna Parsons said.

“I will never attempt a large online purchase ever again,” she said. “Ever.”