You Paid Twice for the Word 'Certified.' One Dealer Just Paid $4 Million for It.

If you bought a certified pre-owned car and there’s a separate line on the paperwork charging you to certify or inspect it, you paid for the same thing twice.

Go find your buyer’s order. Not the loan contract, the itemized page with the fees on it.

On August 19 the FTC and Connecticut Attorney General William Tong announced a $4 million settlement with Manchester City Nissan, legally Chase Nissan LLC, along with its owners and managers. The allegation was simple enough to explain at a dinner table. The dealership advertised used cars as certified pre-owned, then charged the buyer a fee to certify them. It also slid products like total loss protection into financing agreements without asking anyone first, and collected more for registration and taxes than the state actually charges.

Tong’s description: the dealership “systematically ripped-off Connecticut customers through needless, unauthorized junk fees.”

Look at the clock on this one. Connecticut sent the dealership a civil investigative demand in 2021 and a warning letter in 2022. The state and the FTC sued in January 2024. The check gets written in August 2026. Five years from first contact to settlement, and officials say the dealership’s own data showed customers were frequently charged thousands of dollars in unlawful fees the whole time.

Here’s what makes the certification fee worse than an ordinary add-on. Certified pre-owned is a factory program. The inspection, the reconditioning, and the extended limited warranty are the product, and their cost belongs inside the advertised price. Charging you separately to perform an inspection the ad already promised is not a fee. It’s the same thing sold to you twice.

Dumb math, and none of it yours.

The money is real. Financed junk grows. Run it yourself in our loan calculator: a $2,000 add-on rolled into a 72-month loan at 9% costs you about $2,596 by the time the last payment clears. You paid $596 in interest for a product you never asked to buy.

Now the part nobody in the press release wants to say out loud. The order that bans this behavior binds one dealership on one road in Connecticut. It requires that dealer to display the maximum total price and get your express, informed consent for every charge. Nobody else’s paperwork changed on August 19.

That matters more this month than usual, because the FTC just narrowed its fair lending theory on dealer interest rate markup. Two different levers. Rate markup got quieter. Junk fees under Section 5 of the FTC Act did not, and this settlement is what that looks like.

So audit your own deal. Pull the buyer’s order and read every line beneath the vehicle price. Circle any certification, inspection, or reconditioning charge on a car sold as CPO. Circle total loss protection, GAP, VIN etching, nitrogen, and any paint or fabric package. Then check the registration and tax lines against your state DMV’s published schedule.

Found something you never agreed to? Email the dealer’s general manager, name the line and the dollar amount, and ask for it refunded in writing. If that goes nowhere, file with your state attorney general’s consumer protection division. That is the office that started this case.

Buying next month instead? Ask for the itemized out-the-door price in writing before you go in, and compare rates on our best loans page so the financing conversation isn’t the first time you see a number. More on dealer pricing in our loans hub.

One caution for anyone who bought from Manchester City Nissan. The $4 million is earmarked for consumer redress, $2 million due within seven days and $2 million within ten months, but no claims process has been published yet. Any refund notice will come from the FTC or the Attorney General. Anyone who calls asking for a fee to recover it for you is running a second scam on top of the first.

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