As the founder of a large lease-training company once said, there is an opportunity to take advantage of the customer in a lease. Since poorly-written consumer finance regulations did not require disclosure of important lease information (including the vehicle price or the interest rate), leasing companies and dealers didn’t provide it. This gave unscrupulous salesmen a great opportunity to commit outrageous acts of fraud with little chance of being discovered. Or so they thought.

While the number of people leasing was growing in leaps and bounds, the volume of consumer complaints was also picking up steam. At first, it appeared to be just a few isolated stories of people who said they were misled and cheated on lease transactions, but it soon began to look like a more serious problem.
By 1992, some consumer protection agencies were beginning to get hundreds of complaints about new-car leasing, which led to the formation of a task force by the attorneys general from 22 states. A number of investigations were started, and dozens of lawsuits have been filed.
What were the complaints about? Many of them were about salesmen who had secretly raised the price of a car (or the APR on a loan) after quoting a lower one. And some people said they received no credit for their trade- ins, while others received less than the amount that was negotiated. Similarly, down payments and rebates were often not properly credited. (In some cases, salesmen had secretly increased the cap cost to cancel out the effect of trade-ins and down payments.) A common complaint of elderly buyers was that they were switched to leases without their knowledge.
The following investigations and lawsuits illustrate the numerous ways that people have been victimized by leasing scams. In all of the legal cases, most of the victims did not even realize they had been cheated.