WFTV Now
A local car dealership Action 9 has been reporting on for the past two years is shut down after the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles revoked its dealership license. The Benji Auto Sales locations in Orlando and south Florida are both now closed.
Victoria Sjostedt had serious injuries after getting struck by a car in August. “When the impact first happened, my leg kind of exploded,” Sjostedt told Action 9 Consumer Investigator Jeff Deal. But as she worked to recover, she found herself dealing with a billing nightmare for a wheelchair she claims she turned in months ago. She said, “I don’t know, it’s overwhelming.” When Sjostedt was released from the hospital, she was provided a wheelchair and billed around $50 a month to use it by a company called CareCentrix, but she said after returning it to Orlando Regional Medical Center in December, the bills kept coming.
A local veteran claims when something major went wrong with his water lines, the company left him high and dry.
Benji Auto Sales is a dealership Action 9 has warned consumers about before.
A truck that’s been in the Hempsted family nearly seven years was essentially taken from them, at least on paper. “So, it’s been a huge pain, but I don’t know how else to get around it,” Christine Hempsted told Action 9 Consumer Investigator Jeff Deal. It appears someone cloned the Orange County family’s vehicle and registered it in another state hundreds of miles away. Christine Hempsted said she couldn’t re-register the truck in Florida after someone else registered it in Massachusetts. Part of what makes it so bizarre is that that they’ve never had the truck out of their possession since they got it in 2018. Now, because someone registered it up north earlier this year, they were stuck with expired Florida tags.
Taylor Weekend 2025 was supposed to be a Taylor Swift-themed weekend of fun, but after organizers and customers spent thousands of dollars, it was suddenly called off.
A Volusia County couple has been trying to get rid of their timeshare since 2017. They got desperate and hired a timeshare cancellation company, but instead of getting help they got burned. “We wound up doing it. To this day I regret it,” Jeff Lamey told Action 9 Consumer Investigator Jeff Deal. Jeff Lamey and his wife Sandy spent nearly $11,000 with the timeshare exit company and are still stuck with the timeshare.
A local woman thought she hired the right movers, then got hit with a huge bill. Ashley Rogers said, “We’re not the kind of people that have thousands and thousands of dollars just sitting around. So, it was definitely stressful.” Rogers claims the moving company threatened to hold their belongings hostage unless they paid up. This is the same type of scenario Action 9 has exposed before and the company involved appears to be connected to other companies that aren’t even allowed to do moves in Florida. Rogers told Action 9 Consumer Investigator Jeff Deal, the company let Rogers and her husband know about the new inflated price after their belongings were already loaded on the truck.
When you trade in your car to buy a new one the dealership is supposed to pay off the old loan. But what if it doesn’t? That’s what Cody Alexander of Winter Garden said happened to him after buying a new ride at an Orlando car dealership. “As far as my bank is concerned, they’ve never received a check. They’ve never received anything validating the fact that I sold the car,” Alexander told Action 9 Consumer Investigator Jeff Deal. He said he’d been waiting around two months for the payoff, and was still stuck with a loan on a car he no longer had in his possession.
Heidi Busher of Orlando paid a $1500 deposit to replace part of her fence, but she claims the company never built the fence and won’t return the money. “I think it’s despicable, honestly,” Busher told Action 9 Consumer Investigator Jeff Deal. The company, Knight Fence, is a company Action 9 has warned consumers about before.
