Dale Sundeen (Photo: Auto News)
Dale Sundeen, the Colorado Department of Revenue Auto Industry Division’s criminal investigator who was investigating Grand Junction’s Red Rock dealerships, quit his job with the state and went to work for Red Rock Auto Group as their “Corporate Director of Compliance.”
After examining paperwork from their transactions at Red Rock dealerships, more people report they’ve found forged signatures on their contracts and other documents from their deals:
AID Investigator John Bulman (Photo: Golden Police Dept)
The Colorado Department of Revenue’s Auto Industry Division (AID) has assigned a second criminal investigator to help the with the Red Rock dealership cases.
The first investigator looking into Red Rock is Dale Sundeen, who’s been with the Colorado Department of Revenue since 2008 and has been the agency’s western slope investigator for over ten years.
The additional investigator is John Bulman, who joined the Auto Industry Division in 2022 (pdf) after working for the Golden Police Department, where he was awarded Golden Police Officer of the Year in 2020.
Red Rock GMC on First Street
Former Red Rock dealership employees have told AnneLandmanBlog that the dealerships coerce both employees and customers to leave positive reviews online, and a customer said the Red Rock dealership she patronized several years ago had paid her $2,500 to take a bad review of them off her Facebook page.
These manipulations of online reviews were discovered around the same time Red Rock introduced a new “Forever Promise” on their websites, in which the company promises to “earn your trust” and “be transparent.”
A reader supplied AnneLandmanBlog with screenshots of a 2019 Facebook Messenger conversation in which she told another person that Red Rock had paid her $2,500 to remove a Facebook post describing a bad experience with a Red Rock dealership:
Brantley Reade (far left end of check)
As of today, Brantley Reade, Platform Manager for Red Rock Nissan, is no longer with the Red Rock Auto Group. He was formerly the designated person to call if you had been victimized by a deal at Red Rock’s Nissan or Kia dealerships.
So now, if you were a victim of a deal at a Red Rock dealership in which your digital signature was added to a contract without your being able to first see and expressly approve or reject any charges added to it (like extended warranties, maintenance agreements, protective coatings, key fob insurance, GAP insurance or other items), or if you found your signatures have been forged on any documents from your deal, or if your gross income, monthly housing payment, description of your vehicle or any other information was misrepresented to your lender on your loan application and Red Rock got you into a loan too big for you to handle, contact Red Rock owner Bryan Knight at (801) 792-3711 or email him at bryank@tdauto.com to make an appointment to discuss your situation and give him a chance to make it right.
KREX-TV last night ran a 5 minute news segment about Red Rock dealerships, which are currently under investigation by the state for problems including forgeries of customers’ signatures on legal/financial documents like contracts, Powers of Attorney, title and loan documents, and the addition of thousands of dollars worth of extras to customers’ contracts without their knowing, like extended warranties and special coatings.
Below is the full statement of a former title clerk who worked at Red Rock. This person asked to remain anonymous. This statement was included in the KREX news segment, but it merits fuller attention because of its gravity. This person’s employment at the dealership has been verified, and they had experience with the Mesa County Department of Motor Vehicles before going to work for Red Rock:
Review of Red Rock Hyundai received from a reader via snailmail earlier this month, pg. 1
A common theme running through customer complaints about Red Rock dealerships is that they discovered thousands of dollars in extended warranties added to their contracts without the dealership telling them about it, and they spotted these extra charges only after their signatures had been affixed to their contracts electronically. Customers repeatedly say they did not want these warranties and never agreed to them, only to find they had been added to their contracts anyway when they finally saw their paperwork. Once saddled with them, the customers had to go through the ordeal of trying to cancel them quickly, because the warranties are only fully refundable within 60 days after purchase.
I did this drawing myself.
Did you buy a vehicle from a Red Rock dealership and think you may have fallen victim to shady sales tactics? If so here’s some help:
First, think back to the day of your purchase:
Did the financial manager have you sign your name electronically on an IPad or email Docu-sign link? Did the financial person show you your full contract including the page with all the numbers on it, with the total price of the purchase and all the extras, before your signature appeared on it? Did the financial person tell you about the extras that had been added to your contract — extended warranties, maintenance agreements, oil changes, coatings, insurance, etc. – and did you openly agree to pay for all of them, or were they hidden from you?
Credit application with Sonja Bartlowe’s real signature on it in three places. Her $3,500 gross salary type is marked “weekly,” “bi-weekly,” “monthly” AND “annually.” The application says at the top, “Incomplete applications will not be processed,” but none of the boxes below that are checked to indicate whether she is applying for an individual, joint or business loan.
Sonja Bartlowe is a single mom with two little girls and no child support who worked as a branch manager for a home care provider. Last May she traded in a vehicle and bought a 2016 Nissan Titan pickup truck priced at $39,000 from Red Rock Nissan, at least that’s what it was priced online.
Little did she know what she was in for.
Katelyn Slocum’s real signature. “I always sign my full name,” Katelyn says.
The signature that appears on all of Katelyn Slocum’s documents in her vehicle deal except one. Katelyn says this is not her signature.
Katelyn Slocum is a Certified Nursing Assistant with two small kids who works as an in-home hospice care provider for HopeWest. She uses her own car to get to her patients’ homes, and at the end of 2021, she decided she needed a more efficient car. She ended up at Red Rock Nissan, where she traded in a 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee with almost 100,000 miles on it for a 2019 Subaru WRX with about 17,500 miles on it.
The transaction happened late on a Monday. Katelyn said, “It was a super-rushed purchase because it was past closing time, as it took awhile to get me approved for the loan amount.”
After hearing about other people whose names were forged by Red Rock and all the other problems people had had with their purchases, she was prompted to more closely examine her documents for the purchase of her vehicle, and on December 22, 2022 she took another good look.
The $9,000 in extra charges Red Rock Hyundai included on a 21 year old customer’s contract without his knowledge or approval. After this deception was exposed and the customer confronted the dealership, they removed these charges and gave the customer a satisfactory new deal on an entirely different vehicle. See the bottom of this article for who to contact to get satisfaction if you’ve been ripped off by a Red Rock dealership.
The 21 year old customer of Red Rock Hyundai featured in a December 29 blog about the horrendous way the dealership treated him during his purchase of a used mid-sized truck reports that after almost two months of dealing with the situation, he has finally gotten full satisfaction from the dealership.
After the blog about his plight was published, the customer returned to the dealership with his father to press for concessions beyond the $4,500 the customer said the dealership had previously paid him “to essentially stay quiet about the deal.” As a result, the dealership took the problematic truck they initially sold him back as a trade-in, gave him a decent amount of money for it, and then sold him an entirely different vehicle for what the customer also considered an appropriate price. The dealership also removed the $5,000 charge for the extended warranty that the customer said he never wanted, and the $4,000 charge for a “Resistall” coating that the customer also didn’t realize he’d been charged for.
Got a crazy Red Rock dealership ripoff story? Send it to anne@annelandmanblog.com. If we use it, we’ll keep you anonymous if you prefer.
I got an email yesterday from yet another Red Rock Hyundai customer who had a story that was so incredible, I had to share it. It includes yet another charge of forgery, as well as the addition of thousands of dollars in extras to the contract without the customer’s knowledge or approval. I spoke to this person on the phone to verify that they were a real person, get more details about their story and clarify some of the terms they used in the email.
The person who wrote this is 21 years old and came from out of town to purchase the vehicle. The name is redacted to keep the sender anonymous, upon their request:
Jesus Acevedo’s signature next to the signature a Red Rock Hyundai employee forged on a contract in his name that would have added a $10,000 extended warranty to his contract, had he not caught the forgery while at his credit union to arrange financing.
People have sent information to AnneLandmanBlog that indicates customers of Grand Junction Red Rock dealerships have had their signatures forged on documents, and that such forgeries have likely been a problem at these dealerships for some time.
Red Rock Nissan at 2582 Highway 6 & 50 in Grand Junction
The Red Rock Auto Group seems to be starting to get the message about the financial hardship they’ve been causing people by defrauding customers and carrying out business in bad faith.
This week Red Rock Nissan went out of their way to help “the Andersons” (not their real name), a struggling young couple with three kids, two of whom are special needs kids, who were recently featured in this blog as an example of the kind of bad deals people were unknowingly getting into at these dealerships.
Red Rock Nissan at 2582 Highway 6 & 50 in Grand Junction
Yet another former employee of a Red Rock auto dealership has contacted AnneLandmanBlog wanting to unload about what they experienced while working for Red Rock, and wanting others to know how business is done at these dealerships. This person has more detailed knowledge about financing of vehicle deals. Their name is withheld at their request. I asked this person follow-up questions based on information provided by a previous Red Rock employee who came forward and told about the illegal acts allegedly taking place at the dealerships, like falsifying customers’ financial information to lenders, misuse of digital signatures, forging of signatures, and more. This new person has even more detailed insight into these dealerships, the things they do to customers and banks, and how and why Red Rock dealerships operate so differently from other dealerships in town and around the country.
A former Red Rock auto dealership employee contacted AnneLandmanBlog wanting to unload about what he experienced in the years he worked for the dealership. He asked to remain anonymous, so his name is withheld. He said he was “ashamed” about having worked for the dealership and wanted to do whatever he could do to help people who fell victim to these scams.
Following are excerpts of our conversation, edited slightly for clarity:
Lyn M. says this screen shot “is all we know about the loan” she and her husband got from Red Rock Nissan in Grand Junction. They went to Red Rock to buy a car advertised on the dealership’s website at $17,000. Without knowing it, they came out with a loan for $30,000 at an interest rate of 12.49%, far above what they could afford.
Lyn Anderson and her husband Jim (not their real names) thought they should trade in their older Ford pickup and get a slightly newer, more family-friendly vehicle, so they went online to see what was available locally.
Little did they know what they were getting themselves into.
