Lifted Nissan trucks exist. Somewhere. And there happen to be enough buyers that a dealership parts boss managed to sell more than $500,000 in lift kits and get away with pocketing the money. Until his greed caught up to him.
A former parts director at Formula Nissan in Barre, Vermont, pleaded guilty in federal court to a single charge of mail fraud. According to Automotive News, the employee was hired in 2019 to manage the parts and service department, eventually being promoted to director.
The parts scheme, however, didn’t start until 2021, and from January of that year until September 2022, the parts director ordered hundreds of Nissan lift kits on behalf of the dealership. On the surface, it’s standard operating procedure: order parts from corporate, dealership is invoiced, dealership pays invoice, and parts are entered into inventory. Oh, but he skipped that last bit. Instead, he posted the parts for sale on Facebook.
The kits cost between $2,300 and $2,900, but the fraudster listed them below the dealership’s wholesale price and received payments via his personal PayPal. To inquisitive customers, he said the steep discounts were possible because Formula Nissan received the parts at dealership prices (and not because they were, you know, effectively stolen). On top of that, he even used the dealership’s FedEx account to ship more than 200 kits across the country.
The charging documents allege that the “out-of-pocket loss” for the dealership and its insurance company was at least $575,000. For now, Sticky Fingers remains free with conditions until his sentence hearing, initially scheduled for October 31 but delayed until December 12. His mail fraud guilty plea means he faces up to 20 years in prison plus a fine or double the amount of the dealership’s loss, whichever has more zeroes.