Some wealthy automobile enthusiasts cannot resist the allure of owning a rare hypercar. Michael Mente, a Los Angeles billionaire, handed over $5.4 million to a French automobile dealer for a Mercedes-AMG One in 2021. A federal lawsuit filed in February alleges Mente bought a construct slot from the manufacturer and later selected his custom options for the F1-inspired hypercar. Nevertheless, the French automobile dealer had vanished.
Mente, the founder and CEO of online fashion retailer Revolve, got in touch with Colorado attorney Scott Oliver to facilitate the acquisition. Oliver represented the dealer by the name of Jean-Pierre M.R. Clement, the Denver Post reported. Nevertheless, this guy with the absurdly stereotypical French name wasn’t real. The Department of Homeland Security informed Mente in June 2022 that the agency believed Clement was actually Texas con man Traveon Rogers. By this point, the Mercedes-AMG One has already sold out and production hadn’t even began yet. Oliver said, “Rogers was quite a personality. Clearly he was in a position to persuade people and get them to pay money and defraud people out of quite a lot of money.”
Rogers claims to have been an oil industry project manager who became a billionaire by investing early in Snapchat and starting a non-public equity firm. His legal history tells a much different story. He’s currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for felony theft in an analogous scheme through which he impersonated Aston Martin representatives and forged documents.
The AMG One is an appealing piece of bait
This is not even the primary time Rogers has attempted his Mercedes-AMG One scheme. He allegedly stole $3.19 million from one other unsuspecting buyer, in accordance with a 2023 lawsuit. Oliver facilitated the fraudulent deal as well but is simply named as a defendant within the Mente case. The lawyer claims he had no knowledge of the deception.
It is simple to see why the Mercedes-AMG One was such an appealing piece of bait. The primary AMG One was delivered to the USA by championship-winning NASCAR team owner Rick Hendrick in 2024, in accordance with Automobile and Driver. The hypercars are filled to the brim with technology from the Mercedes-AMG F1 Team, and only 275 of them were ever built. The 1,049-horsepower machine has performance that matches its exclusivity as the primary production automobile to finish a sub-6:30 lap of the Nürburgring.
The one lesson that could be learned from scams is all the time to do your due diligence before making an expensive purchase. You do not have to be a billionaire to be the goal of fraudsters. With the proliferation of public parking agencies creating smartphone payment apps, fraud schemes cropped up using fake QR codes to attach drivers to phishing sites to steal your financial information. For many who do not like paying for parking, there are also fake parking tickets that scammers use to do the identical thing.
This Article First Appeared At www.jalopnik.com
