It is common for car sales to add a tracker to a car they finance. It is very helpful during the repo process.
Many of them pay the owner to allow them to recover the device when the loan is paid off.
Many of them pay the owner to allow them to recover the device when the loan is paid off.
What you're referring to are devices installed by smaller shady "buy here pay here" dealerships that do in house financing for people with bad credit. Even then, gos trackers are extremely rare. Much more common are remote disabling devices. If you make a car unable to function, it's not that hard to find. Heck, they don't even really want to find it. They want to motivate the owner to make their payment, which disabling it usually does.
Finally, what some normal dealerships do to increase profit and ease of making aftermarket sales, is preinstall theft deterents or safety devices to ALL cars on the lot, and then hope they can upsell each buyer during the paperwork process. The reason this is done is because having to bring the car back to the dealership to have your after market products installed is a huge pain, which becomes a major sales objection. Thus, dealerships decided to start installing the devices in every car ahead of time, since they are cheap parts anyway, and using that as a sales tactic to sell you on paying for the actual service contract or insurance (the word used loosely here) as part of the product they installed.
Tldr; dealerships install $39 GPS trackers in every car on the lot. 25% of the time, they manage to extract $500-1000 of profit by selling the service for $1200 to a buyer. This pencils out on the end, thus they keep doing it. Definitely a more sleazy tactic that almost no dealership I worked for used, but not uncommon. Heck, the OP story was done at a franchise Audi dealership.
Well kinda. I've helped investigate high end auto theft rings, and I can tell you almost all luxury cars have tracking built directly into the infotainment system. Only manufacturers and a handful of people at the largest auto groups can activate it remotely.
There's no way anyone at AutoNation or Penske Automotive knows how to do this.
Poor people are a great source of extra income through fees for exploitative companies. I bet re-enabling the car costs a significant fee...