Price-truth patrol for car dealers. We check every price you advertise, on every channel, against the price a buyer can actually walk in and pay.
On March 13, 2026, the FTC sent warning letters to 97 dealer groups: the price you advertise has to be the price the customer pays. Doc fees, dealer prep, mandatory add-ons - if the buyer cannot decline it, it belongs in the headline number. The only charges allowed out are government tax, title and registration.
In September 2026, FTC staff published Pricing Transparency FAQs spelling out how dealer ads are judged under the FTC Act - and named six deceptive practices, including "Phantom Vehicle Advertising": advertising cars you cannot actually sell, like sold units still live on your site. In enforcement cases, civil penalties can reach $53,088 per violation. That is not an automatic fine for every typo - it is the standard your own listings are measured against, every day, whether you look at them or not.
And here is the part nobody tells dealers: your own syndication pipeline breaks that standard on its own. Your site says one number, Cars.com repeats another, a weekend special typed into Facebook never comes down, and a sold car keeps advertising itself for a week. Your feed vendor's contract says accuracy is YOUR problem. We make it ours.
The day you sign up, we put your truth on record: every vehicle price plus every mandatory charge - doc fee, dealer prep, forced add-ons. That sum is your walk-in price, the one number the FTC standard measures you by.
Every day, the patrol reads every listing you have - your site, Cars.com, AutoTrader, CarGurus, Google, Facebook - and checks each car, VIN by VIN, against the baseline. Your correct listings and authorized syndication are recognized and left alone.
Every mismatch gets a dated evidence record and a correction packet with the exact field and value each channel must change, plus a feed-resync request - filed under the authorization you sign at signup. A price that drifts again gets caught again.
Once a week you get the compliance report: patrolled daily, what we caught, what got fixed, what's still open and how long it's been open. The paper trail you'd hand an attorney - or an investigator.
Your site says $28,148, Facebook says $26,900 - same car, two truths. Buyers see bait; regulators see a pattern.
The doc fee quietly dropped on one channel, or the bare vehicle price with every mandatory charge left out.
Sold and delivered cars still advertised live - the exact practice the FTC named in its 2026 crackdown.
A "Weekend Special" that ended November 2, still being advertised on November 9. A dated offer that never comes down is a deceptive price.
The same VIN at two different prices on two channels at the same moment - proof nobody is watching the feed.
A corrected price that quietly drifts back next week - re-audited daily, so a fix has to stay fixed.
Every protected dealer gets one report a week: days patrolled, listings checked, findings by type, evidence attached, corrections filed and confirmed, and the clock on anything still open. If an FTC or state enforcement letter ever lands in your market, the warning-letter radar triggers an immediate out-of-cycle audit - and your file shows you were patrolling before they called. Printed on its face: PriceGuard 365 provides compliance detection and document preparation. It is not a law firm, and the report is not legal advice.
The channel or platform that carries the listing - they make the final call on their own pages, and we don't pretend otherwise. What we control is the packet they receive: the exact field, the wrong value, the right value, and dated evidence of the live state. Precise packets get acted on; vague complaints get ignored.
No. Corrections run only under the authorization you sign at signup - the same setup every legitimate compliance service uses. No signed authorization, no changes. You can revoke it any time.
Some channels sit behind bot walls or login gates - parts of Facebook Marketplace are the big one, and some dealer sites block automated reading entirely (when that happens, you land on our call list and we set you up manually). We sweep your site and the public listings on every channel we can reach. Anyone who promises 100% coverage of the whole internet is selling you a story.
Feed-driven channels usually reflect a resync within a day; manual marketplace fixes can take a few days. We track every correction to its answer, verify it on the next daily patrol, and re-file anything that drifts back.
No. PriceGuard 365 is a detection and document-preparation service: we audit your advertised prices against the FTC's published standard, assemble evidence, and prepare and file corrections as your authorized agent. For legal advice, you want an attorney - we'll hand them a file worth having.
Three things: your fee schedule (the mandatory charges in your deals), your inventory (the feed your website already runs on, or your site address), and the signed authorization at signup. After that, your job is reading one short report a week.
Honesty box: every number in the demo patrol above comes from a real run of the PriceGuard 365 engine over a clearly labelled SAMPLE dealer (a fictional Michigan lot, 14 invented vehicles, planted channel listings) - the results are baked from that run, not typed in. The patrol log above is a simulated feed of that same run, not a live connection. Listings that matched the walk-in price, including an authorized syndication listing, score clean in the same run; listings correctly removed after a sale are left alone. Correction packets in the demo are DRY-RUN drafts, every one stamped blocked_pending_authorization - nothing was changed, filed, or sent. The FTC facts are from the March 13, 2026 warning letters to 97 dealer groups and the FTC staff's September 2026 Pricing Transparency FAQs under the FTC Act; the $53,088 figure is the per-violation civil penalty ceiling in enforcement cases, not an automatic fine for every error. Checkout is live: the plan buttons above open real Stripe checkout for RMH Marketing and Consulting LLC.
PriceGuard 365 is a service of RMH Marketing and Consulting LLC. © 2026 RMH Marketing and Consulting LLC.