88 Percent Paid More: The FTC's Complaint Against Lindsay Automotive Group

The Federal Trade Commission and the Maryland Attorney General charged Lindsay Automotive Group with systematically deceiving and overcharging car-buying consumers for years, alleging the dealership group's advertised low prices routinely gave way to mandatory fees and add-ons that cost buyers thousands of dollars more than expected.DOCUMENTED

The joint complaint named three Lindsay Automotive Group dealerships in the Washington, D.C. area — Lindsay Chevrolet in Woodbridge, Virginia; Lindsay Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram in Manassas, Virginia; and Lindsay Ford in Wheaton, Maryland — along with the group's part-owner and president, its chief operating officer, and a former general manager.DOCUMENTED

The gap between the advertised price and the actual bill

According to the complaint, Lindsay Automotive advertised deceptive prices and promoted prices that were not actually available to most customers — a bait-and-switch dynamic in which the number that draws a buyer into the dealership bears little relationship to what most buyers actually end up paying.DOCUMENTED The agencies' internal analysis of a sample of Lindsay's own transactions found that 88 percent of customers paid more than $2,000 above the advertised price between 2020 and 2023 — a figure that, if representative of the dealership's broader sales practices, suggests the gap between advertised and actual price was less an occasional pricing error than the routine outcome of the sales process.DOCUMENTED

The complaint also alleges Lindsay made deceptive claims that vehicles had to be financed through the dealership itself, a practice that can generate additional revenue for a dealer through financing fees and interest markups, while limiting a buyer's ability to shop for more favorable loan terms elsewhere.DOCUMENTED

The named executives

Beyond the corporate dealership entities, the complaint names part-owner and president Michael Lindsay, Chief Operating Officer John Smallwood, and former general manager Paul Smyth as individual defendants.DOCUMENTED Naming individual executives alongside the corporate dealerships reflects the FTC's broader recent practice of pursuing personal accountability for decision-makers in consumer-protection cases, rather than treating a corporate settlement alone as sufficient deterrence.REVIEWED

According to the agencies' sample of Lindsay's own sales records, 88 percent of customers paid more than $2,000 above the advertised price between 2020 and 2023.

How the case eventually resolved

More than a year after the December 2024 complaint was filed, the FTC and Maryland Attorney General announced a settlement requiring Lindsay to provide full refunds and pay additional penalties. Consumers charged a total of more than $75 million in connection with purchases and leases between April 1, 2020, and December 31, 2025, may be eligible for redress, and Lindsay agreed to pay a $3.1 million civil penalty to the Maryland Attorney General's office.DOCUMENTED "Lindsay Auto misled consumers by advertising false low car prices and then adding mandatory fees and other charges during the car buying process," said Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection.DOCUMENTED

Part of a wider pattern in dealer pricing enforcement

Lindsay Automotive Group is one of several dealership networks the FTC pursued over deceptive pricing and undisclosed fees in the same period, including the record $20 million settlement with Leader Automotive Group and its parent, AutoCanada, announced within days of the Lindsay complaint.REVIEWED Taken together, the two cases reflect a coordinated FTC focus on the gap between an advertised vehicle price and the price a buyer actually pays once mandatory add-ons, financing requirements, and other fees are factored in — a practice regulators describe as a persistent industry-wide problem rather than conduct isolated to any single dealer group.REVIEWED

The proposed order settling the case also requires Lindsay to provide the total price of a vehicle, including all mandatory fees, to consumers looking to buy or lease going forward — a structural fix aimed at preventing the advertised-price bait-and-switch from recurring rather than relying solely on the financial penalty to deter future conduct.DOCUMENTED

Why the sample-transaction figure matters

The 88 percent figure cited in the complaint carries particular weight because it comes from an analysis of Lindsay's own transaction records rather than from a survey of customer complaints or anecdotal reports.REVIEWED When regulators can point to a company's internal sales data showing that the overwhelming majority of actual transactions departed from the advertised price by a specific dollar amount, it moves the case from a dispute about a handful of unhappy customers to a demonstration that the gap between advertised and actual price was the norm, not the exception, across the dealership's full customer base during the period at issue.REVIEWED

For consumers who purchased or leased a vehicle from one of the three named Lindsay dealerships between April 2020 and December 2025, the settlement's redress program offers a path to recovering some portion of the amount they were overcharged, though as with most FTC settlements the exact individual payment amounts depend on how many eligible consumers ultimately file claims and how the settlement fund is administered.REVIEWED Concurring statements from FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson and Commissioner Mark Meador, issued alongside the settlement, also urged Congress to grant the FTC broader authority to obtain equitable monetary relief in cases like this one, where the agency's own direct restitution powers under Section 5 of the FTC Act are more limited than the civil-penalty authority available to a state attorney general partner.DOCUMENTED

The gap between the FTC's own remedial authority and the penalty power available to a state partner like the Maryland Attorney General is one reason joint state-federal actions like this one have become increasingly common in consumer-protection cases: pairing the FTC's broader jurisdiction and investigative resources with a state's civil-penalty authority allows the two agencies together to secure a fuller remedy than either could achieve independently.REVIEWED

Have documents relevant to this story? Reach us through our tips channel.