'Somebody at the Auction Cut These Wires:' Man Buys 2017 Kia Forte at Auction Since It Was 'Running Good.' Then He Takes It Home

• Kia

Malice and a small pair of wire cutters—that's all it takes to ruin a person’s day, and potentially wreck their bank account. You might be simply buying a car at auction, but there’s a chance a saboteur might be working against you. So by the time you get it home, it’s not “running good” anymore.

Car dealer Avery Bell’s (@averybellll) TikTok video on auto auction scams has more than 172,000 views. It’s a short video, but it highlights a nasty trick that someone pulled when he was purchasing a 2017 Kia Forte.

Vroom Vroom…Boom?

In his video, the camera zooms in on the small, 4-cylinder engine in the Kia Forte. Bell shows the engine running, but it sounds “rough.” It sounds like the kind of junk car that wakes up the neighborhood, stinks up the street, and eventually rots forgotten in a driveway—the early promise of an eyesore, and an HOA flurry of text messages.

“It was running and driving good, no lights on the dash, no nothing. I bid on it, I get it here, and it’s running absolutely horrible,” says Bell.

He then points out that at the time of filming, the engine isn’t running smoothly. “As you can see, it’s still misfiring, right now,” he says.

But the Louisville, Kentucky, entrepreneur says he did his due diligence: “We replaced all four spark plugs, and we moved around the coils to see exactly which cylinder is misfiring.”

According to Bell, cylinders two and four are the problem.

Snip Happens

The real problem is the ignition wires. As he brings the camera in for a close-up, it’s clearly visible that the wires have been cut in two places. At one point, he even pulls the wires apart to show that they’ve been cleanly severed.

“If I put them together,” he says, “it runs better.” And though he’s rhetorically unclear if the audience can hear the difference, it is clearly audible.

The Forte Is Small, Yet the Comments Are Fierce

People have strong opinions about cars, and it’s probably because cars are such a tangible, visible extension of ourselves. Unlike a messy, run-down, or out-of-date home, our car is our calling card to the world. It helps shape a public image.

And no one wants to backfire their way through life.

The comments make this clear. “First mistake was buying a Kia,” snipes William. (He clearly hasn’t noticed that Bell resells these cars.)

Though there are other Kia-bashing comments, the majority offer advice and sympathy.

“Tell the Auction to check the cameras and fin[d] the person that did that, they can lose their auction pass license," counsels Muddy Offroad Shop.

Meanwhile, the tone in other comments might be described as weary unsurprise. The sigh in Howard Driscoll’s thought is almost palpable: “The auction didn’t do that, a buyer did.” Bell agrees, claiming in his video that a competitor likely snipped the wires, hoping people would notice and not bid on the car, allowing them to scoop it up for cheap and fix it quickly, since they already know the exact problem.

Commenter Joe also cheekily agrees, writing, “oldest tr[i]ck in the book.”

Cutthroat Business

Bell is 21, with his own modest dealership, and has been flipping cars since he was 19. It’s an admirable achievement for such a young man. And it’s understandable that he might miss some tricks as he’s probably still learning.

This “old trick” is one that is relatively easy to fix, but just enough of a pain in the butt to make a less handy buyer walk away. “Sabotage to keep people from bidding too high on it,” asserted TikTok commenter slipperyslope330.

Clearly, dealer auctions are not places for the faint of heart (or mechanically illiterate). And generally, they aren’t places the public can go freely (though there are a few).

However, there are dealers who do offer a car-buying service to laymen who don’t have access to dealer-only auctions. Redditor u/Fearless-Phrase suggested looking on Facebook or Craigslist for individuals who offer that service.

In that same thread, Redditor u/flashesbuck suggested going to an auction before buying to see how it works, especially since most cars sell for close to what they’re going for on lots. And in this transaction, the buyer doesn’t even get a test drive.

The consensus across the comments and several Reddit threads is that auction-buying is best left to the experts and happy tinkerers.

That being said, if you’re in the market for a 2017 Kia Forte with freshly reconnected wires and a clean bill of health? There’s a guy in Kentucky who’s got a great deal for you.

Motor1 reached out to Bell via his business Instagram.