A Toyota customer posted a viral video after going to the dealership to get an inspection. She says the dealer tried to scam her out of $189.
Michelle (@michellerxc) has reached over 62,000 views and 600 likes on her TikTok by Wednesday. She added an on-screen caption to the first part of her storytime video titled, “Toyota tried to scam me.”
To begin her video Michelle says, “Toyota tried to scam me, part 1.”
“You heard that, right? Toyota tried to freaking rob me.”
Michelle explains how the day prior to making her video she scheduled a service appointment at her local Toyota dealership because she needed an inspection on her car.
“As soon as I get there I go into the service apartment and they greet me,” she says, “They tell me everything that they’re gonna be doing today, how much they’re gonna charge me.”
After walking back into the lobby while Toyota works on her car, she says she put her headphones on because she needed to get on a call. “Like two minutes in and the guy comes back,” Michelle adds. She says he asks if Michelle can step outside and talk to him for a second.
“We’re walking back to my car, and as we were walking by he starts asking me if on the way to my appointment if I had hit something or if my car was driving funny,” she says. “I said, no,
why? Don’t tell me that I have a flat tire.”
Next she says the dealer told her she doesn’t have a flat tire but that “it’s something worse.”
Once the two made their way to her car, Michelle says “he tells me that when I got out of the car, that he noticed that my car was steaming from the hood.”
“I’m like, what do you mean my car was steaming? Like, there was absolutely nothing going on with my car. He didn’t even have any lights on,” she adds. “So I guess I should have been a red flag from the beginning, and I was naive enough to even believe that there was something going on with my car.”
Michelle says the dealer began giving her “excuses” claiming something could have happened to her car because “yesterday was raining like really, really hard. It was pouring.”
“Well, maybe some water got in your engine, and, um, you know, like, it’s causing your car not to start,” she imitates what the dealer told her. Michelle says the dealer also told her that her car “wouldn’t move.”
“By the way, I also think that you might have a leak,” she says he adds. He points out that there’s like, a red fluid in there … all the way to the left side, and it’s supposed to be completely full, and it’s not full all the way.”
“So he believes that there might be a leak in my car, and apparently he had checked and he couldn’t find anything. He couldn’t find a leak, so they had to take some parts out of my car to check to see.”
@michellerxc toyota is a scammer #fyp #fypシ #storytime #scam #scammeralert #beaware #toyota #badexperience #part1 ♬ original sound – Michelle Rojas
Michelle posted a part 2 to her storytime video. In the second video Michelle says the dealer then told her that in order to fix everything on her car “we need to charge you $189.”
At this point, Michelle says she didn’t know what to do so she authorized the charge for $189. “I mean, I don’t have any other option. Is not like I can just get in my car and drive to a mechanic somewhere else, you know, like, I can’t. Like my car, it’s not moving.”
As the mechanics work on her car Michelle calls her husband to let him know what’s going on. She says her husband told her, “Why did you authorize them to charge you for a diagnostic when there’s absolutely nothing wrong with your car? One, You haven’t had any issues. Two, um, you haven’t got any alerts. Your car was perfectly fine this morning. Your car was perfectly fine till you pulled up to that place. So there’s really nothing going on with your car and they’re trying to … scam you. They’re trying to take your money and rob you.”
“So I started making calls … starting putting all the dots together and realize that they were trying to rob me. They were trying to take money away from me. So, um, you know, I started making comments right in front of everyone there in Toyota,” Michelle says.
When the dealer returns to the lobby, Michelle says she asks him point blank, what’s going on with her car. She says he told her, “I don’t know,” and that they ran her car for 20 minutes and now “it’s back to normal.”
“I’m like, you don’t know? I mean, you’re a mechanic, you work in the service apartment and you don’t know what’s going on with my car?” she says she asked.
“I was like, you know what? I’m not gonna pay the $189 because there’s really nothing going on with my car. You guys didn’t do anything? … You guys just ran it for 20 minutes, and apparently it’s back to normal.”
Before ending her video Michelle adds, “I ended up fighting off that charge and they didn’t charge me the $189. I just paid for the inspection of what I was supposed to.”
@michellerxc TOYOTA TRIED TO SCAM ME PART 2 #fyp #fypシ #storytime #beaware #SCAM #SCAMMERS #scammeralert #TOYOTA #thief ♬ original sound – Michelle Rojas
Viewers in the comment section left their common experiences with Toyota car dealerships. “They told my wife she needed to change the air filter and cabin air filter, my wife told him to show me cause my husband changed it last week,” one comment said.
“I took my Tacoma to a toyota dealer for an oil change and they recommended that the spark plugs be replaced, they quoted me $750 for 4 plugs, I laughed at them and asked if they were gold plated,” another says.
In other Daily Dot headlines, a TikToker caught an AutoNation Toyota worker messing up their transmission while getting it serviced.
The Daily Dot reached out to Michelle via the TikTok comment section and Toyota via media contact form.