Checks are going out in New York one audited dealership at a time, and the company writing them is the lender that owned the cars all along. Nissan Motor Acceptance Company LLC, the captive finance arm that buys Nissan leases from dealers and holds title to the vehicles, agreed to refund every New Yorker who was overcharged for buying a leased Nissan at the end of the lease term. Nobody has to fill in a form or meet a deadline to be paid.
Assurance No. 25-071 and the 45 dealerships left out of the earlier deals
The agreement is an assurance of discontinuance under Executive Law § 63(15), the New York statute that lets the attorney general close an investigation by binding a company to specific conduct instead of suing it. Nissan Motor Acceptance Company LLC, known as NMAC and based at One Nissan Way in Franklin, Tennessee, is the successor to Nissan Motor Acceptance Corporation and serves as the captive finance company supporting Nissan North America’s sales and leasing.
Attorney General Letitia James announced the agreement on June 3, 2026, and its reach is what makes it unusual. Her office had already settled with 15 individual Nissan dealerships. This one runs through NMAC itself, so it covers anyone overcharged at any of the 45 New York Nissan dealerships that were never part of those earlier settlements, and it covers buyouts NMAC processed directly. Her office said NMAC would pay restitution through mailed checks in the full amount of the overcharge on a rolling basis throughout 2026 as it audits all dealerships statewide.
Four dates on a settlement notice: Only one of them is the deadline that matters, and the other three are what make people miss it. See the four-date rule in The Settlement & Refund Recovery System.
A price set at signing, then rewritten at the counter
The lease itself is the reason the overcharges are provable. Section 15 of Nissan’s SignatureLease fixes what a lessee pays to keep the car: the purchase option price, plus official fees and taxes, any required inspection cost, and a $300 purchase option fee. Used-car values spiked during the pandemic, which made those pre-set prices a bargain for lessees and a lost sale for dealers, and the assurance describes what some dealers did about that.
Some simply refused to process buyouts, hoping the lease would lapse and the car would revert to them. Others agreed only if the customer accepted large documentation fees or add-on products, then buried the markup by bundling a real warranty, a real repair and a pure overcharge into one line reading “Aftersales.” Some charged $399 for a certified pre-owned inspection that lease buyers were not supposed to be billed for at all. One customer was charged $2,563 for electrical tape that the dealership’s own system valued at eight cents. Others were charged as much as $3,200 for safety recall repairs that federal law, 49 U.S.C. § 30120, requires be done free. Between January 1, 2020 and August 31, 2022, the investigated dealerships processed nearly 10,000 buyouts; the attorney general’s office examined the paperwork for every one and found more than 3,000 carried overcharges worth more than $4 million.
What the check covers, and why some of them are larger than the fee
The assurance defines the refund arithmetic rather than leaving it to the company. A “Total Allowed Charge” is the lease purchase price, the $300 fee, sales tax, legitimate after-sale or repair products, the $150 optional dealer fee New York permits, and state title and inspection fees. Anything billed above that is an unlawful pre-financing overcharge. On top of it sits the financing overcharge: the extra principal, fees and interest a buyer paid NMAC purely because the price it financed was inflated. Refunds are paid as a check made out to the person who bought the vehicle, sent to the last known address with an explanatory letter, and the nominal amount is increased for inflation using the Bureau of Labor Statistics price index for the New York-Newark-Jersey City area.
The audit period runs from January 1, 2020 to March 1, 2022 for dealerships outside the original investigation. NMAC must also hand the attorney general’s office documents sufficient to show that every overcharged consumer was in fact refunded.
$4.5 million and 3,100 people, before this agreement
The earlier rounds give a sense of the sums involved per household. The 15 settled dealerships paid $1 million in penalties and refunded more than $4.5 million to over 3,100 consumers. The largest tranche came on May 6, 2025, when eight dealerships agreed to more than $3.2 million: Garden City Nissan alone paid $824,013 to 361 overcharged customers along with an $89,624 penalty, and Smithtown Nissan paid $643,640 to 321. Two Long Island dealers settled for $350,000 in June 2024, and five more for over $1.9 million in March 2024.
James said the dealers “misled their customers with junk fees and other costs to cheat them out of their hard-earned money.” Her office asks anyone affected by deceptive lease buyout practices to file a consumer complaint, which remains the route for a buyer whose paperwork does not match the record.
The clocks NMAC is now running against
The assurance does not stop at money. Within 180 days of the effective date, NMAC must revise its consumer-facing buyout paperwork and rewrite Section 15 of the SignatureLease to say plainly that the capped price applies no matter who processes the deal and that no certified pre-owned fee may be charged on a buyout. Within 365 days it must either take dealerships out of the buyout process or install controls that report the final post-add-on price, flag any total above the allowed amount, and block the transfer of title when an overcharge is attempted. The attorney general’s office reviews those measures before they go live.
NMAC neither admits nor denies the findings. It does agree, in paragraph 51, that failing to perform on time is itself a violation, and that evidence of such a default is prima facie proof of the statutory violations the office laid out. The matter was handled by Assistant Attorney General Alec Webley of the Consumer Frauds and Protection Bureau under Bureau Chief Jane M. Azia.
Lease buyout refunds arrive as mail, not as an announcement
An enforcement action like the Nissan one pays out quietly: a check and a letter, addressed to whatever address the lender had on file at the time of the buyout. That is exactly the kind of payment that goes stale, gets returned, and ends up with a state unclaimed-property office years later, filed under a name the household stopped using. Knowing which official desk holds that money is a different skill from knowing a settlement happened.
The Settlement & Refund Recovery System is a 36-page guide with a 5-tab Excel tracker pre-filled with all 51 state unclaimed-property offices and a source vault of 12 official places money sits.
Look up the state unclaimed-property offices in The Settlement & Refund Recovery System.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources.
