I Thought I Was Paying Sales Tax For My Car From A Dealer But Official Documents They Had Me Sign State I Did Not. I Left A Review About The Situation And Now They Are Threatening To Sue For For Defamation.

This is going to be a pretty long and detailed explanation and I would greatly appreciate anyone willing to read it and make an assessment:

I purchased (financed through my own bank) a vehicle from a small used auto dealership in Colorado in August of 2024.

As we were negotiating, they were sending me worksheets dealerships use to lay out prices. On the worksheet I agreed to, it has the vehicle price at $12,000, Dealer handing at $399.00, Total Tax (6%) at $743.94, Title $37.20, and emissions at $25.00 brining the total to $13,205.14.

$13,205.14 is the final total price after we negotiated on the vehicle price being $12,000. No issues here, it had been a pleasure working with them and the negotiations were fair.

I had my bank send them a check for $13,205.14 and once it got to them I went in and signed the paperwork to take the car home.

At this point I trusted them as it had been a great experience so admittedly I was not very skeptical on what I now know they were pulling. They drafted the purchase agreement to have the vehicle price at $12,786.14 with a $399.00 dealer handing fee. Under the total tax there is a big fat zero and $20 in the title fee column.

After all was said and done, I drove the car to Vermont which is the state I reside in. I recently took it to the DMV to get my Vermont registration on the vehicle and get the title to my bank the lien holder. At the DMV the purchase agreement said the price was $13,205. I told them that is including sales tax I paid on the vehicle and the 6% should be waived as I assumed the dealer had done the right thing and sent that money over.

They told me they have received no such money from the dealer and I was initially told it is illegal for them to collect the tax money from me that has already been paid by me. After speaking with somebody else, I was told I could just pay sales tax on 6% of $13,205.

If I need to do that I will as now the bank is waiting for the title of the vehicle and threatening to raise my interest rate to an extremely high number if they do not get the title upon registration soon.

Since that morning at the DMV I have been trying multiple times and methods per day to contact the dealership to get this sorted, most of which were during their posted operational hours on google. I called them, no answer. Emailed, no answer. Texted, no answer. Even replied to the old Facebook marketplace listing that the owner put out on Facebook marketplace, it said "seen" on Facebook messenger but no answer.

After all of that failed, I updated the review I previously left on google from five stars to one star. Clearly laying out the fact that I am just trying to reach them regarding a question I have that I assumed to be an error within their paperwork.

Just 3 hours later, the business responded to my interview. They asked my to revert my interview back to 5 stars or they would not help me figure out the tax situation and immediately started pointing fingers at my local DMV saying it's an error on their part. I have registered many cars at the Vermont DMV and have never once had an issue.

I couldn't respond to the review response directly so I decided to respond to it via email to the owner laying out the point that I will leave a good review once I am provided good service.

They had plenty of time to clear this up and at the end of the day, if I truly did misunderstand something, I could have apologized and fixed my review and just pay the taxes at the DMV.

After going back and forth with the owner of this dealership on email about how I agreed to a price of $12,000 and wondering where the $743 I paid went when I intended it to be towards Vermont sales tax, he ended up calling me a "pissworm", "asshat" and told me to "go fuck myself". He actually did say that to me via email yesterday evening. He said he is done responding to me and he will get around to the situation "once he files taxes" which I assume he means April.

My overall favorite line from one of his emails was:

He later told me he is done responding to my emails and that I am basically on my own in terms of them clearing up the situation.

Today, I took to a large Facebook group and posted the email where he stated the above, called me names, and told me to go fuck myself. I captioned it "this is the response I receive from the owner of said dealership after requesting clarification on some tax issues I had." I also detailed how they seemingly bought fake robot reviews on google which is clearly evident if you look at their reviews. 33 five star reviews within the last month from google accounts with no profile picture and one review all of which have broken English. Even a technologically inept boomer would be able to tell they're fake.

As you can imagine, some people took to google reviews after seeing the manner in which this dealership handled business and wrote negative reviews. I did not encourage them to do this but nor do I believe it is wrong as people are free to express their options of a business via interviews.

As of 12:30pm today I received an email from the owner with the attached purchase agreement which I unfortunately signed indicating a paid no sales tax when I was under the impression I was paying 6% sales taxes on the vehicle.

After replying with the worksheet I have that says 6% sales tax were collected he states:

So now he is trying to manipulate me to remove my review and he will send me not even half of the money if I remove my review reflecting my poor experience with his dealership.

I will not agree to this as at this point is not even about the money for me, at first I wanted to save $743 but now I do not care about that money and want to shine light on this dealership.

I told him his case would have no grounds as I have not lied about any of the bad experiences I had with his dealership but he doubled down on threatening legal action saying:

I know the chances are that he will not indeed proceed with legal action against me but if he is to, did I do anything wrong? I genuinely did not intentionally lie about anything regarding my experience with them, I was just genuinely frustrated by their behavior.