In this transcribed episode of the Used Car Dealer Podcast, Zach talks with Ben Gill, CEO of Advent Resources and founder of Remarketing Plus and VEEROSA AI, and John McNellis, COO of Remarketing Plus, about two pressures increasingly shaping used car retail: finding the right inventory at the right price and protecting the dealership from increasingly sophisticated fraud.
Ben brings nearly three decades of automotive technology experience, having worked his way through Advent Resources before becoming CEO and later helping launch Remarketing Plus and VEEROSA AI. John brings nearly four decades across dealership operations, rental, fleet, wholesale remarketing, vehicle acquisition, and disposition. Together, they explain why tight used vehicle supply, rising acquisition costs, auction competition, and fraud risk are forcing dealers to become more disciplined on both sides of the transaction.
The conversation covers synthetic identities, fake driver’s licenses, falsified proof-of-income documents, first-party fraud, identity verification, used-car reconditioning, direct vehicle sourcing, auction pressure, transportation risk, and building a more predictable inventory pipeline. Ben explains why technology alone cannot protect a dealership without consistent processes and training, while John makes the case for securing vehicles further upstream through rental and fleet sources instead of waiting until inventory needs become urgent.
Whether you’re an independent dealer trying to protect a small team from fraud, improve acquisition costs, reduce recon risk, or build a more reliable flow of inventory, Ben and John offer practical takeaways on strengthening dealership processes, sourcing vehicles more strategically, and using AI to support better decisions without replacing experienced human judgment.
Zach: Zach here, and today we’re looking at two sides of the same used car transaction: finding the right vehicle for the lot and protecting the dealership once a buyer enters the sales process. Joining me are Ben Gill, CEO of Advent Resources, and John McNellis, COO of Remarketing Plus, part of the Advent Resources organization. Ben has been focused on increasingly sophisticated dealership fraud, while John brings a close view of used vehicle supply affordability and sourcing strategy. So this should be a practical conversation, and I appreciate both of you jumping on the podcast with me today.
John McNellis: Thanks for having us.
Ben Gill: Good morning, Zach. Thank you for having us.
Zach: For the listeners who may not know about your backgrounds, give us an abbreviated version of how you entered the industry and what shaped the way you understand dealership operations today. We can start with Ben, then John.
Ben Gill: Thank you, Zach. I started in the business in 1996 when my father bought into Advent Resources, which had been around for about eight years at that time. I was a high school kid taking out the trash, repairing dot matrix printers, and repairing and remanufacturing green screen terminals. That was my beginning in the business.
Ever since then, I’ve worked every position at Advent. I’ve been the CEO of Advent for six years now, I believe, and before that, I had about eight years as president. I am also the founder of Remarketing Plus, along with our partners, and the founder of our new AI fraud detection business, which is called VEEROSA.
Zach: Very cool. And how about you, John?
John McNellis: Thanks, Zach. I’ve been in the auto industry now for about 38 years. I started as a lot boy washing cars and worked my way up to used car manager of a franchise GM store. I spent 20 years at one of the top three rental companies overseeing both retail and wholesale remarketing operations for the US, Canada, and Brazil. I’ve held a role in vehicle registration renewal, building a vertical for a company I worked for. Then I held an executive role as COO of operations for a fleet truck rental company, overseeing all operations, acquisition, and disposition. Now I am working with Ben as the COO of Remarketing Plus.
Zach: Both of you work under the same company umbrella but focus on different areas. Talk about those different focus areas, where they intersect, and what you’ve seen this year in the automotive industry and market. We’ll do Ben, then John again.
Ben Gill: Thank you, Zach. Things aren't moving rather rapidly in a bunch of areas in automotive. This year has been very tricky for used car acquisition. Buying used cars is getting more and more expensive. Being able to get the right inventory at the right price when you need it is, for any car dealership, whether it’s an independent dealership or a franchise shop, one of the key ingredients to success. On our Remarketing Plus side, we’re certainly very much focused on that for the thousands of dealers that we help our fleets sell into.
On the Advent Resources side, we are ever focused on perfecting the car deal: all of the credit, compliance, desking, document generation, and all the e-contracting associated with funding the deal. The Advent Resources mission is to perfect the car deal, make it the most efficient, most profitable, most compliant, and best consumer experience that can exist.
Joe or Jane Auto Dealer is really understanding that the consumer experience, the efficiency of processing a compliant car deal, and de-risking the fraud elements are hugely and ever more important. We’re really addressing that.
Finally, we are seeing an explosion of fraud in both the independent and franchise space. As such, about a year and a half ago we got started on building VEEROSA AI, which performs identity verification, proof of income verifications, and other STIP verifications to streamline, bring more certainty to the car deal, and de-risk against both identity fraud and first-party fraud. These are exploding vectors in automotive retail.
Zach: Definitely. And how about on your side, John?
John McNellis: Thanks, Zach. It’s been an interesting year to say the least, with the boom of AI and everybody wanting to leverage that for every need they can think of. The biggest challenge with the used car segment, and Ben alluded to this, is the short supply of inventory.
What we’ve noticed is that with that shorter supply of inventory out in the industry, more of the larger national retail groups are buying into those vehicles in the lane and bidding up prices. So prices have skyrocketed. Cost to acquire, not just the vehicle price point, but paying for facilitations, transport, and so on, has all skyrocketed. It has put a lot of pressure on dealers out there today, hands down. They’re busy trying to buy vehicles at an efficient cost, make money, and supply their lots, and it’s becoming ever more difficult.
Zach: Shifting gears, Ben, I wanted to talk a little more about fraud. Point Predictive’s 2026 report estimates that auto lending fraud exposure is at over ten billion dollars to dealerships, with first-party fraud accounting for around sixty-nine percent of that exposure. What do numbers like that look like at the individual dealership level, and why are used vehicles such attractive targets for organized fraud?
Ben Gill: I’ll give you a couple of anecdotes; there are plenty of studies out there, Zach. Just a couple of weeks ago, a customer of mine who I had previously talked with about anti-fraud products, and who frankly was not interested, saying, “We don’t see fraud, our audience is rock solid,” and so on, got hit across a couple of locations with three different identity fraud attempts. One was successful in getting a $62,000 vehicle over the curb. Then they were stuck trying to locate that vehicle and get it back.
In the used car space, a dealership is traditionally going to be a little bit smaller. They are oftentimes less focused on technology, relying on their lenders for more of the car deal, credit, and related processes. When you have a couple of people working a car dealership on a Saturday afternoon and a handful of customers, you’re often going to do everything you can to move those deals along and try to capture every one of them.
Used cars are also very portable. They’re easy to sell, easy to offload, and easy to turn into cash. As such, a fraudster who acquires a pre-owned vehicle at a new or independent store is going to have an easier time offloading that vehicle, either chopping it up or sending it over a border to ship somewhere.
Zach: Dealers are now encountering synthetic identities: AI-generated pay stubs, fake employers, and all of these schemes. Which of those is currently easiest for a dealership that might have everything in order to miss? Can you walk us through a realistic fraudulent deal from lead to vehicle delivery, just so a dealer can understand how it goes down?
Ben Gill: Absolutely. When the customer is in front of you, you generally have an easier time determining if there’s fraud. One of the easiest vectors to commit fraud is a customer who comes in where everything from the top level looks completely up and up. They have plenty of income and a very high credit score. Those types of profiles often very quickly disarm the salespeople and F&I managers within a dealership. Those are often influencing factors that lead staff to move through and process a deal more quickly without inspecting every part of the deal as carefully as they might.
In a situation where you have a special finance customer going into a subprime lending scenario where the lender is asking for all sorts of additional documentation, oftentimes the smoothest deals are the scariest ones, Zach.
On top of that, when specifically talking about synthetic fraud, we have powered synthetic identity checks using traditional database checks and looking at patterns: how long has the credit profile existed, and what events and activities built it? We’ve been powering those through partners for at least six to eight years. Those are extremely important signals to examine nowadays, especially with incoming AI fraud capabilities on the bad guy side.
If dealers want to de-risk their business and protect themselves to the best of their ability, they need to use equivalent tooling to uncover these issues and ensure that the person standing in front of them is who they purport to be, and also that they are not misleading the store on the conditions of their situation, namely first-party fraud situations like falsified pay stubs and the like.
Zach: Where should the non-negotiable checkpoints sit across sales, desking, F&I, and delivery? And from a dealer standpoint, they don’t want to come off like an investigator. How do they consider customer experience while making sure they don’t seem overly suspicious of legitimate customers?
Ben Gill: In my opinion, there are a handful of non-negotiables. Every dealership has access to a ton of different tools to address different elements of a potential fraud transaction.
The car business has pretty much universally adopted Red Flag Rule checking and out-of-wallet verifications, things we’ve been powering for 15 or 20 years now. Being able to tie the person in front of us with the credit profile they are presenting to the dealer in an identity theft situation is extremely important. Some of these synthetic fraud checks, and I think we offer the best one out there, are vital, especially as synthetic fraud is the fastest-growing segment in automotive.
Finally, a huge number of dealerships are still taking the consumer’s driver’s license into the back room, making a photocopy, and setting it on the desk or into the deal jacket. The technology exists, and in a self-serving way, we have the best ID verification and forensic document analysis of driver’s licenses across all 50 states and DC to sniff out false identity documents, along with the ability to validate those documents against the Department of Motor Vehicles and various other data sources.
Fake driver’s licenses, in my eyes, are the start and end of nabbing a huge amount of these schemes. If your driver’s license is not real, everything else doesn’t matter because you are trying to process fraud into our business. The ability to check that against external records like the DMV is hugely important.
Zach: Totally. And I wanted to give John some time to talk about the current used car inventory picture. John, Cox Automotive reported approximately 2.15 million used vehicles in retail inventory in July, representing a 46-day supply. But vehicles priced below $15,000 carried around a 32-day supply. What does the national picture hide, and which vehicles remain genuinely difficult to acquire for independent dealers right now?
John McNellis: Thanks. It’s an interesting dynamic. The most popular segment consumers are looking at is generally around a $22,000 to $27,000 price point in acquisition cost, which translates to about a $30,000 retail cost. That tends to be the norm, and it lines up quite well with what daily rental companies sell.
The advantage with that segment is lower reconditioning costs, because daily rental fleets are constantly checked, maintained well, and in standardized condition. Whereas when you get into that $15,000 price point, you’re not buying a product that typically has stellar condition; you have to put money into it, and there aren’t as many available.
The upper-end segment is out there, but when you buy in that upper range, you’re typically buying something in decent condition that you certify or prepare differently. But it’s that middle segment, the $20,000 to $30,000 range, where everybody is really living. That’s what is hidden in the aggregate data.
Zach: Is there a reconditioning trap?
John McNellis: There is. Again, all dealers are trying to acquire assets at an affordable price point where they can move them, turn them, and get them sold. But just because you acquire a lower-cost vehicle doesn’t mean you won’t get stuck in that reconditioning trap. You end up spending a lot more money on recon, and your margins shrink.
From a retail price point you may have an affordable vehicle, but your cost to get it there was much higher than if you had stayed in that middle segment where recon is lower and you acquired it the right way. That’s a big part of this, Zach. You want to buy direct. It’s that simple.
Zach: Black Book recently observed that condition, configuration, and retail appeal are becoming more influential than broad model year and mileage assumptions. How should that change a dealer’s buy box appraisal process or willingness to pay for an imperfect vehicle?
John McNellis: It’s a great question. A lot of times dealers look down the barrel and say, “To acquire assets, it’s either going to be through the trade cycle or going to the auction.” Those are the traditional avenues. But with those, you have no predictable pipeline of incoming assets you can count on where you aren’t getting outbid and can maintain a low acquisition cost.
What happens is, if you’re looking at a trade-in and you’re short on inventory, you’ll probably step up on that trade-in more than you should. You do the same if you’re selling on your retail lot and attending the auction every week, checking all these cars just to get outbid in the lane, falling into the trap of bidding too high on an asset that you now have to recondition.
What we recommend at Remarketing Plus, for the companies that use us for their direct-sale businesses, is for dealers to look at direct channels, because we provide assets far more upstream than you normally see. An auction can’t show you those things.
We encourage dealers to build a pipeline: constantly look at assets that, for example, are currently on rent but returning within a week, and make offers and negotiate with direct sellers at a very low acquisition cost. That means not just sale price, but actual buy fees; you aren’t paying enormous fees or getting outbid in the lane.
Build this pipeline. That way, regardless of how well your used car department is selling, you know you have the ability to capture assets without excessive risk. That allows you to avoid stepping up too high on trade-ins and remain flexible and objective on what you pay, because you know you have inventory coming. That’s a crucial service we provide.
Zach: I wanted to shift gears and ask a question for both of you, starting with Ben. Where do sourcing pressure and fraud pressure collide? When affordable inventory is scarce and managers feel pressure to sell and deliver every available unit, which exceptions become the most dangerous: acquisition standards, identity checks, documentation, funding requirements, or releasing the vehicle too early?
Ben Gill: When there’s more pressure on you and you’re trying to deliver more vehicles in a shorter amount of time, especially late on a Saturday afternoon or evening when you’re rushing to get a customer in and out, those outside influences lead to careless behaviors, regardless of whether the tools exist in the dealership to sniff out fraud and throw up a red stop sign. Those factors make staff far more liable to encounter a fraudulent car deal and send it over the curb.
We have extraordinary technology that can sniff out a fraudulent deal nearly 100% of the time, but the people, process, and training in the dealership are actually the most important parts. If a customer buys our VEEROSA driver’s license product, it doesn’t do any good if someone walks in with a false ID and the team skips running an identity verification.
The tools are wonderful and very useful, but having a deliberate, cut-and-dry process with no gaps or holes is what reduces the probability of a fraudulent deal as close to zero as possible.
Zach: Well said. And John?
John McNellis: I think Ben covered it quite well. When you’re rushed, you tend to make bad decisions and skip steps. Our product allows you not to rush; it allows you to make proper decisions in advance, captures everything needed from a compliance perspective, and keeps you secure. That’s extremely important, and it’s simple.
From an acquisition perspective, looking at a trade-in or auction purchase, if you’re rushed or in a panic, you’re going to make a bad decision. Our strong recommendation is to buy direct from rental and fleet companies, buy further upstream, and secure a pipeline of assets so nobody is rushed and everyone makes proper decisions on trade-in allowances and acquisitions.
Ben Gill: And to arrange transportation through trusted channels as well. Transportation fraud is one of the fastest-growing threats. I’ve read half a dozen articles in the last quarter, Zach, around vehicles getting loaded onto a truck and never arriving.
Zach: Could you demystify this, Ben? A lot of independent dealers, when they hear about a dealer getting hit by fraud or being in litigation, often think, “That’s a franchise dealer or large dealer group; this doesn’t happen to smaller independents.” Can you demystify that based on your experience?
Ben Gill: Let’s just use logic here. If you have a single-rooftop franchise dealership with 80 employees, you have dedicated personnel responsible for compliance activities and processing. How many employees are in the average independent dealership among your customers, Zach?
Zach: I’d say under 10 employees.
Ben Gill: Under 10. You don’t have a person dedicated to compliance in every store. The savvy ones have someone whose responsibilities include defining the sales process: what the yellow caution lights are, what the red stop signs are, and what is non-negotiable in processing a deal. In a large corporate store with every tool, audits, and compliance staff, they’re much less likely to miss signals indicating potential fraud. Smaller operations need clear processes because they don’t have layers of compliance officers.
Zach: What would be the first anti-fraud process you would change at an average independent dealership if you walked in today, Ben?
Ben Gill: I would say that doing an identity verification with an outside records check from the DMV and other sources is non-negotiable on every single car deal. That is going to cut more fraud than any other product available to a car dealer today.
Zach: And John, a similar question: if you went into an average independent dealership, what is the first inventory or recon process you would change, and what weekly metric would you tell the dealer to focus on?
John McNellis: The first thing I would do is tell them to start buying direct from rental and fleet companies, hands down, because you have to achieve a lower acquisition cost.
The second thing, and I would put a KPI against this for everyone in the used car department, is: how many vehicles do you have secured upstream directly from these sources?
Most of these companies we do business with are very easy to work with. Securing assets upstream doesn’t mean, “It’s here and you must take it.” This is a relationship business, and our partner companies are fantastic. But you must ask: how many units do you have secured upstream?
With inventory shortages across the industry, you’re going to get outbid in the auction lanes if you wait. Get rid of the “wait and buy just in time” mindset. Go secure it upstream, 100%.
Zach: Looking ahead over the next 12 to 18 months, AI will improve both dealership decision-making and the sophistication of fraud. Where will technology meaningfully reduce risks, where will criminals adapt, and which dealership decisions still require experienced human judgment? Ben, let’s start with you.
Ben Gill: AI is creating a bunch of wonderful new solutions. Being able to surface problems rather than pouring over rows upon rows of traditional reports gives you the ability to see where the strengths and weaknesses of your business lie. It is starting to assist with telling dealerships what inventory they should acquire, whether new or pre-owned. These are excellent tools to make us more efficient and make better decisions.
At the same time, fraudsters are getting more and more sophisticated around stealing and creating fake identities. The products on the market today do a very good job of sniffing out fake proof-of-income documents, but those tools will have to keep improving as AI generates more credible fake STIPs. If a dealership simply relies on a finance manager or salesperson visually reviewing every paycheck or direct deposit slip, those are becoming trickier and trickier to catch. Automated products that detect fake STIPs are going to become more widely used and increasingly vital over time.
Zach: And John, similar question: over the next 12 to 18 months, what do you see as AI’s impact on your side of the market?
John McNellis: AI is helping dealers make decisions on what assets to put on their lots, price points, vehicle types, and so forth. Dealers should leverage that, but where and when you source those assets is what really counts. Once again: stop waiting to go to the auction. Go direct to the seller, the rental company, or the fleet company. They have the ability to sell direct to dealers, and we facilitate that for them. Secure your assets upstream and have that pipeline ready; it will make life ten times easier for your used car department.
Zach: The last part of the podcast is rapid fire, one-sentence responses. Ben, I’ll start with you: What is one fraud red flag that should never be waived, regardless of how badly the store wants the deal?
Ben Gill: At the risk of sounding like a broken record, a driver’s license verification with a DMV check is non-negotiable on every car deal.
Zach: John, what is one used vehicle category you would pursue more aggressively right now, and one you would pursue very cautiously?
John McNellis: I would buy direct and upstream from rental and fleet companies, and I would be extremely cautious standing in the auction lane getting outbid.
Zach: Last rapid-fire question for both of you: What is one long-standing dealership sacred cow or operating habit that dealers need to retire?
Ben Gill: We need to stop taking photocopies of driver’s licenses and letting them float around the dealership.
John McNellis: We need to stop waiting to secure inventory.
Zach: Awesome. Ben and John, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. If someone listening wants to get in contact with you or your companies, how should they do so?
Ben Gill: They can visit adventresources.com to explore our products there, and they can go to remarketingplus.com to check out our pre-owned vehicle acquisition channels. We’d love to hear from you; please reach out.
Zach: Awesome. Thanks for joining me on another episode of the Used Car Dealer Podcast. Thanks for your time.
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