A Salt Lake City used-car outfit called The Good Car Dealer now faces 15 felony charges for allegedly forging signatures, faking notary stamps, and washing salvage titles to resell hail-damaged vehicles as clean inventory. Among the signatures investigators say were fabricated: that of a Wyoming woman who had already been dead for weeks.
Scott Keith Pryor, the dealership’s owner, bought roughly 292 vehicles worth nearly $2 million through Copart salvage auctions after a massive hailstorm tore through Wyoming last August. Insurers had already totaled the cars and taken possession. Fifteen of those vehicles now sit at the center of a criminal case, with a Laramie County judge finding probable cause for an arrest warrant on June 4.
The scheme, according to court records first reported by Cowboy State Daily, worked like this. Pryor allegedly submitted duplicate title applications to Wyoming’s Department of Transportation claiming the original titles had been lost. Those applications carried signatures and notary stamps that investigators say were entirely fabricated.
Several notaries told investigators the stamps and signatures on the documents weren’t theirs. Multiple vehicle owners said they never signed any title paperwork. And one application bore the name of a woman who died before the hailstorm even happened, a detail that’s hard to chalk up to clerical error.
When confronted, Pryor pointed investigators toward a company called Tennessee Titles, which he said he found on Facebook. He told them he paid about $150 per application to people he identified only as “Rashard” and “Miss Catherine.” He could not produce records proving the company existed or that he ever paid them. That’s the kind of alibi that tends to make prosecutors smile.
Each of the 15 felony counts carries up to two years in prison and a $5,000 fine. The math alone, 30 years of potential incarceration, suggests Wyoming isn’t treating this as a paperwork mix-up.
The real damage lands on buyers. WYDOT investigator Shane Fox alleges that Pryor used the forged titles to sell hail-battered vehicles as if they carried clean, non-salvage histories. Buyers who thought they were getting a straight deal may have driven off lots with cars that should have been branded as rebuilt or salvage, vehicles worth significantly less and potentially carrying hidden structural or mechanical damage from the storm.
It remains unclear whether any of those buyers will be made whole. The vehicles themselves could be tied up as evidence for the duration of the case, leaving people who paid real money for what they believed were legitimate cars in painful limbo.
Title washing is one of the oldest cons in the used-car playbook. A vehicle gets totaled in one state, its title gets scrubbed through lax jurisdictional cracks in another, and it reappears on a lot looking like something it isn’t. What used to require a network of crooked title clerks now apparently requires $150 and a contact named “Miss Catherine.”
The name on the dealership sign makes the whole thing land a little harder. The Good Car Dealer. Pryor chose that name deliberately, banking on the idea that saying the quiet part loud would read as charming transparency rather than irony. The 15 felony charges suggest it was the latter.
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