Speeding and smoking tires: Texas dealerships warned about fake customer's dangerous joyrides
Local car salesmen thought they were dealing with the occasional bad customer, a man who would take exotic cars for test drives only to hit speeds of more than 100 mph, despite their pleas to stop the car.
Soon, they realized the man was doing it on purpose, repeatedly, and filming the incidents for social media. Dozens of videos of the joyrides are posted to an account under the name Ahmer Saeed, many with racist or derogatory captions aimed at the sales staff.
Last summer the Texas Automobile Dealers Association issued an alert about Saeed, warning members across the state about sales staff being "endangered."
"There are other people's lives at risk," said Matt Ducote, the general manager at Moritz Kia in Hurst. "You can see him doing this out on the streets ... so it's just an unsafe situation when someone is driving recklessly like that."
Test drives over 100 mph
Ducote said one of his salesmen was subjected to a test drive with Saeed.
"He gets on the test drive with the salesman and immediately starts spinning the tires, and it looks like he was going 100, 120 miles an hour and the salesman was pretty scared," he said.
Ducote, who has watched several of the videos online, said he sees fear in the faces of sales staff, for both their lives and their livelihoods.
"If you think you're about to sell a car you may not say what you would normally say to someone that's driving that way," he said.
"It's absolutely wild"
The joyrides happened at two of Brandon Tomes' dealerships. "Not only do they have a very expensive piece of equipment that they could damage," Tomes said, "But the risk out there for hurting themselves, the person trapped in the car with them, hurting another family that's on the road."
"It's absolutely wild, and we need to put a stop to it," he said.
Edgar Lopez, one of the sales staff, said what was supposed to be a quick test drive lasted nearly two and a half hours. "I started to get very concerned," Lopez said, "Because any time I would tell him to get off the road or anything like that, he would just ignore me."
Instead of staying on the frontage road, Lopez said Saeed pulled onto Highway 75 in McKinney, quickly getting to speeds topping 160 mph. While he's smiling in the videos posted online, Lopez said inside he was panicking. "It was just a whole bunch of emotions of fear and wanting to get back to my house and wife and kids safely," he said.
No police reports filed
CBS News Texas reached out to nearly a dozen dealerships featured in the videos. Only two said they called police, but neither appeared to have actually filed a report. Law enforcement sources who have seen the videos said some of them could be considered careless or reckless driving, or even unlawful restraint.
Saeed did not respond to emails from CBS News Texas, but he did recently post a video of himself answering a question about potential legal troubles. In the video, Saeed does not admit to being the test driver, but says "the cars are completely fine, they drive fine, so no provable damage has been done to the cars."
Both Tomes and Lopez say that's not the point.
"It's very angering that he sees this as a game," Lopez said. "He sees people's lives as a game."
"Anybody that would take pleasure in that kind of torture, if you will, is just a terrible human," Tomes said.
