Damn, this thread is pretty useful for recovering old memories :-) When the wife and I were very young, and foolish, were were at a Honda dealer, trying to trade our two year old, base model Subaru in for a new Accord. This was in the mid- 80's when Hondas were so hot that you waited for one to arrive at the dealer, and if you were an aggressive negotiator, you paid MSRP, not $1000 more. We had a $3K balance on our Subby, which wasn't too odd, since it was only $4995 to begin with. We just wanted to get out of the loan, with a $3000 trade in value and find an Accord for list. The saleslizard agreed to everything, which was odd, and offered to write it up. As we started to sign the paperwork, I found that they were trying to hide a personal loan to us, a "second mortgage" of sorts, in the pile of paperwork. When I asked what the additional $181 a month was for, they casually stated that it was to "to cover the gap between the trade value of our car and what they can realistically afford to give us fo it". I then read the document, and discovered that they were attempting to trick us into signing a ridiculously high interest rate note for the entire payoff balance on the trade. When I questioned it, and asked then if they were actually attempting to steal our trade in, they danced around and babbled a bit, but both the saleslizard and his manager knew that they were busted. We walked out, totally stunned that these two were actually attempting to commit a crime.