83 Percent of Buyers Charged for Add-Ons They Didn't Authorize, a Survey Found

North American Automotive Services, a large multistate auto dealer group doing business as Napleton, agreed to pay a then-record $10 million to settle allegations that it snuck illegal junk fees for unwanted add-ons onto customers' bills and discriminated against Black consumers by charging them more for financing.DOCUMENTED

The lawsuit, brought jointly with the State of Illinois, named nine Napleton locations across multiple states as defendants, along with the general manager of two Illinois dealerships.DOCUMENTED

Fees buried in a mountain of paperwork

According to the complaint, Napleton dealership employees frequently snuck hundreds or thousands of dollars in illegal junk fees into auto financing paperwork that customers signed, often after long, exhausting negotiations over the vehicle's price.DOCUMENTED Products like paint protection, gap insurance, and extended warranties were charged to customers who did not want them, and these charges were typically added to the total amount financed and spread out over monthly payments — a structure the complaint says made the extra cost difficult for consumers to spot at the time of signing.DOCUMENTED

A survey cited in the complaint found that 83 percent of buyers from the dealerships were charged junk fees for add-ons either without authorization or as a result of deception about what those add-ons actually were.DOCUMENTED That figure — representing the overwhelming majority of surveyed customers — suggested the pattern was systemic across the dealer group's sales process rather than the product of a handful of individual bad actors.REVIEWED

The discrimination allegations

The complaint also alleged that Napleton dealerships discriminated against Black consumers in connection with auto financing, in violation of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Napleton employees had wide latitude to increase the cost of a consumer's loan by adjusting the interest rate markup or the price of financed add-ons, and the complaint alleges Black customers were charged approximately $190 more in interest and paid $99 more for similar add-ons than similarly situated non-Latino white customers.DOCUMENTED

A survey of the dealer group's own customers found 83 percent had been charged for an add-on without authorization or through deception — a rate high enough to suggest the practice was routine, not incidental.

What the settlement required

Under the terms of the settlement, $9.95 million of the $10 million judgment went toward providing monetary relief to consumers, with $50,000 paid to an Illinois compliance-fund program.DOCUMENTED The settlement also required Napleton to establish a comprehensive fair lending program, which included capping the additional interest markup dealership staff could charge consumers going forward — directly targeting the discretionary pricing authority the complaint says enabled the discriminatory financing practices.DOCUMENTED

Refunds distributed in stages

Regulators began distributing refund payments in November 2022, resulting in more than $8.8 million returned to affected consumers in the first round. A subsequent distribution brought the total returned to more than $9.8 million as remaining settlement funds became available.DOCUMENTED

Setting a benchmark that later cases would reference

At the time it was announced, the $10 million judgment against Napleton was described as record-setting for an auto-lending case, a benchmark that stood until being surpassed roughly two years later by the $20 million settlement against Leader Automotive Group and AutoCanada. Between them, the two cases illustrate an escalating scale of monetary judgments the auto-dealer industry has faced over dealer add-on and discrimination practices, as regulators built on the evidentiary and remedial approach established in earlier cases like Napleton's.REVIEWED

Why the interest-rate cap mattered structurally

The settlement's requirement capping the additional interest markup Napleton dealership staff could charge consumers addressed the specific mechanism the complaint says enabled discriminatory pricing: because dealership employees had discretion to adjust a customer's financing rate above whatever a lender initially quoted, that discretion created room for unequal treatment that a fixed, non-negotiable rate structure would not have allowed.REVIEWED Capping the allowable markup doesn't eliminate all discretion, but it does limit how much a discriminatory pattern could cost any individual consumer even if a salesperson chose to apply the maximum allowable markup unevenly across different groups of buyers.REVIEWED

The nine defendant dealerships named in the case, spanning multiple states, illustrate how a single corporate parent's compensation and sales-training practices can produce a consistent pattern of consumer harm across geographically dispersed locations — suggesting the root cause identified in the complaint was structural, embedded in company-wide policy, rather than limited to any one dealership's local management.REVIEWED

The joint structure of the case, brought together with the Illinois Attorney General's office, reflects a pattern seen across many multistate dealer-group enforcement actions: pairing a state's own consumer-protection authority, which often has deeper local knowledge of a specific dealer network's operations, with federal jurisdiction spanning every state where the group operates dealerships.REVIEWED That combination allowed the case to reach dealership locations across multiple states under a single coordinated settlement, rather than requiring separate actions in each affected jurisdiction. The approach has since become the standard model for multistate dealer cases, allowing a single settlement to address a dealer group's practices comprehensively rather than piecemeal, state by state. Napleton's case, brought early in the current wave of dealer junk-fee enforcement, helped establish the survey methodology and add-on attachment-rate analysis that subsequent cases against other dealer groups have continued to rely on when building similar complaints. That methodology — surveying a statistically meaningful sample of a dealer's own customers about their actual purchase experience — has proven more persuasive in court and in settlement negotiations than anecdotal complaints alone, since it demonstrates a pattern rather than a series of isolated incidents.REVIEWED

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