I bought a truck from the Used Car Factory in July. - C Davis
I bought a truck from the Used Car Factory in July. The credit application Ricart prepared listed another customer's Social Security number, phone number, and driver's license number under my wife's name. My own contact numbers were wrong. Everything we provided at our credit union pre-approval was correct. Ricart didn't catch it — our credit union did, three to four weeks later, when the loan couldn't close.
In those three to four weeks, no one from Ricart contacted us. No follow-up call about the purchase, no check-in, nothing. We learned there was a problem from our lender.
What happened after is why I'm writing.
I drove to the dealership and asked for a finance manager or general manager. I was directed to a sales supervisor, spent about two hours there, and left with no answers and one instruction: bring my wife back to re-sign. I called and left two messages. Nobody returned them.
Then I posted a review, and a manager replied in thirty minutes.
That manager was the general sales manager of a different division — the one who monitors reviews. He forwarded my complaint elsewhere. The manager of the Used Car Factory, the division that actually sold me the truck and made the error, never contacted me. Not once, over six weeks. Neither did the finance manager. Not to explain, not to apologize.
The one call I did get came from the employee who prepared the original paperwork — the person I had asked in writing not to be routed back to. He confirmed he hadn't read my complaint. He said the error appeared in one document; when I pointed out it appeared in several, he checked and agreed. He told me my Social Security number was on the title application, which was wrong. Asked how another person's data got into our file, he had no answer. Asked where my wife's information went, he said he had no way of knowing.
Correcting the paperwork took three attempts. The second version came back with the wrong county, a phone number I haven't had in years, and an employer I left about a decade ago.
Over six weeks I asked five times, in writing, whether my wife's Social Security number, phone number, or driver's license number ended up in another customer's record, and whether the person whose data was in ours had been notified. Neither question was ever answered. Ricart said the third-party matter would be handled internally and offered $199 toward identity protection my wife would have to purchase herself and submit a receipt for.
Credit where it's due: Noah Stein got the final paperwork right and was responsive when I reached him directly. Lynne DeWitt in Consumer Affairs was polite and professional and answered quickly — but only after I found her contact information on my own sale documents and escalated there myself. Nobody at Ricart routed me to her. Nobody at Ricart routed me to anyone.
What concerns me most is what none of this produced. Dealerships handle Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, and financial records all day, and they are treated as financial institutions for exactly that reason. Yet no one at Ricart would confirm that this was documented as a security incident, that anyone searched their systems to find out where my wife's information went, or that the customer whose Social Security number ended up in our file was ever told. I asked repeatedly. The answer was that it would be handled internally, and nothing further.
The only people who engaged were the ones I found myself, after the problem was already weeks old and after I posted publicly. Every step of fixing this fell to me. I identified the error, I chased the answers, I caught the mistakes in each round of replacement paperwork.
If you finance here, read every field before you sign, photograph your copies, and verify what gets submitted on your behalf. And know that if something goes wrong, nobody is going to call you.
Read More
Dealer Reviews
Cars for Sale
Dealer Log In