A court in the United States handed down a four-year prison term to a Vermont man who orchestrated a scheme to obtain five Tesla vehicles without paying for them, according to Market Watch reporting.
The case centers on Michael Gonzalez, who uncovered a vulnerability in Tesla’s ordering process in 2018. He paid an advance of twenty-five hundred dollars for a Tesla Model 3 priced at sixty thousand dollars, yet the payment failed to cover the full amount charged to the company. Tesla proceeded with the vehicle delivery and issued documents enabling him to register the car in his name, even though the accounts linked to the transaction did not contain sufficient funds. This sequence allowed him to acquire a brand-new vehicle under questionable circumstances.
Within three months, Gonzalez sold the Model 3 for forty-two thousand dollars and then repeated the operation with four additional Tesla Model X vehicles, each valued at roughly one hundred fifty thousand dollars. He relied on the personal identities of acquaintances, including girlfriends, as buyers in separate transactions. The scheme began to unravel only after he set fire to one of the cars to trigger insurance coverage, exposing the fraudulent activity. The total value of the stolen Teslas amounted to about five hundred sixty thousand dollars. Under the terms of his plea agreement, he agreed to reimburse Tesla nearly five hundred ninety-three thousand dollars to cover the losses involved in the fraud.
Earlier, a separate case in Astrakhan involved a scammer who persuaded a buyer of a Toyota that he was an automotive dealership employee and obtained a payment of three million rubles through that deception, highlighting a pattern of opportunistic fraud in the auto industry across regions.