The exotic car rally scam that rocked Ohio

so we show up and it was a veggie tray great great dinner i had that night [Music] so back in 2017 me my buddy max and my other buddy brandon we were local car photographers at the time uh up in cleveland ohio we were doing you know photo shoots at events and stuff like that we got approached by a guy who's putting on a rally at the time we're like this is awesome you know local young car photographers we get to shoot this amazing automotive rally you always look at gold rush and you see how amazing it is so we got the opportunity to do that so we started talking with the guy and he's like this is gonna be super cool we've got 40 cars coming all types of stuff you know lamborghini ferrari mercedes all the stuff you want to see we get to know this guy we go to a few like meetings with him you know out to dinner and stuff and he's like so we're gonna get a media vehicle for you and you know your hotel's gonna be covered by me you'll get to shoot this whole trip like you know at the time you're just doing it for free it was for the experience we were super excited once we got to know the guy seemed like a really good guy and he was telling us like oh this is all the cars i have signed up and he's showing us the list and he's like i got the sponsor bring in you know mclaren 675 an aventador a 458 and you know back in 2017 younger i was like you know 675 being a new car like this is awesome you know get spent the weekend you know going from a few different cities at the time he was planning on going you know cleveland columbus to pittsburgh so short trip weekend trip a lot of people are able to make it price i looked at the price on it was like 2 000 to do it a little steep in my opinion but you know i'm not paying i was excited you know whoever shows up it'll be a great time so i got to know some of the drivers on the rally and you know donadell being one of them that's how i got to know him pretty well and we've been talking about it for a while and he's you know people seem pretty excited for it nothing really stood out is you know this could be weird or you know first time starting this could not end well so we get about a month away from the rally and the guy i'm talking to him and he's like hey some of the guys are backing out you know the 6.75 isn't coming the aventador isn't coming but you know we still got i think i have this 918 coming i'm like 9 18. awesome so gets about a week away from the rally and you know i'm talking to the drivers and now the cars that he told me are coming are coming but whatever you know i knew some of the guys they were starting to become friends of mine so i was just excited you know get away for the weekend shoot some awesome cars and hang out with people day of the rally shows up we are starting at an audi dealership up in manor things look great you know get there the whole dealership is set up for it they're pulling cars out of the showroom for display and i got there about 7 30 that morning and the guy is hosting the rally we'll call him aaron aaron you know calls me he's like hey i'm running late i'm like okay what's going on he's like oh i just had to pick up some shirts okay i mean there's a few last-minute sign-ups but sure whatever i don't care i'm excited so we see people start pulling in and you know about 10-15 cars get there aaron isn't there i'm like what's what's going on like i'd who's gonna put like nobody knew what to do at the time because there was nobody there to put on the rally so we're all just kind of standing around and you know joking and having fun you know everybody's excited you know weekend rally go do some fun stuff drag racing you know all that type of stuff about hour to hour 15 minutes after i show up which i was a bit early but he finally pulls in in a dealership dodge durango as like the support vehicle we're gonna shoot out of and he gets there and opens up and there's no shirts in there they were already at the dealership so i did i didn't say anything i was like okay i don't know what's going on but it's a little weird maybe overselect i don't know not my not my problem and we start getting closer to the drivers meeting everybody's there i think we had about 28 30 cars there so everybody's getting super pumped up or putting all the decals on the cars all down the sides of them everybody's getting them he's helping and it starts pulling out the waivers you know people sign off and saying hey if i do anything stupid it's my fault we're reading through it and stuff and you know it's saying you know obviously no refunds if anything happens you're responsible blah blah blah and by one buddy who had an r7 at the time he's you know comes over he's like so i'm not going to sign this until the meeting's over i'm like no fair enough you know i want to hear what the guy says first then just sign it before you go then he starts going around he grabs people's driver's license and he's taking those and bringing them back to the dealership and scanning them bringing them back and attaches it to the waiver and some people are kind of getting a little concerned like i don't know why he's collecting all this information you know i'm more than happy to sign off but let's let's see what this guy has to say first so he pulls us into the dealership and the driver's meeting was happening in the break room so we all go into the break room and everybody's in there you know super like let's go like let's hit the rotor we just ready to go it was like four hours of sitting in the sun everybody's pumped up like let's have a great weekend so he gets in there comes up to the front and he pulls some of the sponsors up he's like i would like to thank you guys for coming out this means a lot like without you guys this wouldn't be possible thanks for you know putting helping me put on this great trip and sits him down he's like all right next i like to bring up the photographers so me and my buddy max come up and he's like these guys are awesome like their photos have been great like we're super excited to have them on the rally he's like alright so first off i want to say thanks for everybody coming this is great but i have some bad news the rally's canceled and i have no money to refund you everybody goes silent the whole room just you look around it looks like the soul left everybody's body you know after everything went down you know we'll i'm looking around and you know there's 28 30 people there so some have been discounted you know some of bangkok some paid full price it was kind of like a hodgepodge of you know who paid what i'm not sure what everybody paid but it was roughly about two thousand dollars per person maybe one free uh ended up being maybe forty five thousand dollars i would assume which is a lot of money just for riley to disappear with you know seeing that he only spent money on a video and maybe some instagram promotions out of nowhere people just start getting angry i get it two thousand dollars that's a lot of money just to be thrown away on some you know weekend trip that isn't happening anymore it's people asking like where's my money like give it back like you know why is this happening like what's going on all these questions are going around and somebody's like all right listen everybody stop aaron get out of the room so he gets out he walks just head down right through the hall goes and leaves now we're in this audi break room right now just sitting there like what do we do so half of us are like i'm done this is enough let's call the cops like i don't care let's just you know get this handled and well like other people like listen it's saturday it's the afternoon a lot of banks are closing like there's not much we can do right now let's just go and figure something out let's make something out of this weekend so i would say about half the people stood up super angry slam the door shut leave and just get in their cars and go half of us are like well we already had the weekend off our money's gone but we'll get it back like let's let's do something let's you know have our own rally so we go out we head downtown that night and he had one dinner planned for us and we showed up to that restaurants like what we already spent two thousand dollars at least get free food out of it so we show up and it was a veggie tray great great dinner i had that night but we get there and you know we start looking into like what is he doing like where has he been and you look back he's been at like courtside basketball games he's been at clubs and we left that night planning on meeting at our local cars and coffee spot and we see the signature on dodge durango driving and it parks right in front of valet at cleveland's nightclub gets out and goes right inside this can't be real this can't be happening right now like what is this so we meet up with about 10 12 people the next day and you know we go to our local cars and coffee spot so we get there and we meet up get some coffee like let's hit the rebels just find stuff to do so you want we did some go-karting that day drove down to columbus got a hotel there we stayed at easton i believe went out that night had some fun went had dinner and at dinner we're looking and you're like well what should we do and everybody's like well we should probably start with uh calling the dealership so like well they're closed now so we'll we'll call monday we finish up go home weekend's over people were there had a great time we all had a great time had a lot of good friendships with a lot of people there so we call in monday and we're like hey we would like to know what is happening and they're like oh how'd the rally go like well we got some bad news aaron has all our money and you know we need it back and they're like well there's something we can do and we'll have to you know get rid of him so they ended up firing the guy never heard from the guy again after that you know we continue on with our week start refunding our accounts paypal luckily was through with all the transactions so we were able to refund the money through paypal everybody got their money back and we realized if we're gonna have a rally in cleveland again we're just gonna need to do it ourselves after that we started our own rally recharge rally and we've been going on three years and you know we'll learn from the worst experience makes the best so that was the story of the rally that never happened this time of year i know a lot of us are trying to clean out our garages and maybe get rid of some things that we probably don't need so if there's an extra set of wheels and tires sitting over in the corner or an exhaust that you forgot to install or a part you bought two of and forgot about that too the best place to sell them is on mod find and likewise if you're trying to find a part new used aftermarket oem for your car truck project whatever the best place to shop for those is also on modfind modfind is a free app that you can download in the android or ios store and that will allow you to buy sell transact whatever you want to do a car a part a tool anything related to the automotive hobby it also allows you to create a listing and then add a kickback to incentivize your followers to share it with their followers they make it very easy to share to all the major social platforms and we'd like to thank them for their support of bin wiki this month please go download their app today buy sell your parts a few of mine are already listed there and it's a great platform and i cannot wait to see where they go from here

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 258,479

Rating: 4.6309423 out of 5

Keywords: rally, exotic car rally, recharge rally, ryan cook, scam, fraud, consumer advice, paypal, refund, dispute, audi dealer, dealership, road trip, adventure, vinwiki, car stories

Id: pt2F_3Bksb0

Length: 11min 54sec (714 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021