A Mercedes-AMG One Hypercar Was Part of an Alleged $5.4 Million Scam

If it’s too good to be true, it just might be.

A Los Angeles man is suing in federal court claiming he was scammed out of $5.4 million while trying to buy a Mercedes-AMG One hypercar, according to The Denver Post. The plug-in hybrid hypercar, which was unveiled in 2022, was, at the time, said to be immediately sold out as well since only 275 would be made.

The alleged scam started a year before, in 2021, when the L.A. man, identified as Michael Mente, worked with a Colorado lawyer named Scott Oliver and a French seller named Jean-Pierre M.R. Clement. But Clement, the suit says, was a fake name, and behind the alleged fraud was a man identified as Traveon Rogers, who is currently serving time in prison in Texas in an unrelated case.

Mente had paid $5.4 million to get a build slot for the car from Mercedes, but now that money is gone and the Mercedes-AMG One never delivered. The lawsuit was filed last month in U.S. District Court in Colorado. The Denver Post said it could not reach Mente or Rogers for comment, but did talk to Oliver, the attorney.

“Rogers was quite a character,” Oliver told the Post. “Clearly he was able to convince people and get them to pay money and defraud people out of a lot of money.”

The Post also viewed Rogers’s various social media accounts, in which he claimed to have been an athlete in the NFL and claimed to have made billions of dollars investing in startups. Other users on social media have published takedowns of Rogers’s alleged scams; Rogers has also been previously arrested several times, according to the Post.

Most relevantly, Rogers had been sued in 2023 for a different alleged scheme involving the Mercedes-AMG One hypercar, in which he was accused of using over $3 million to buy a house in Texas.

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Scams in the world of supercars, hypercars, and classic cars are all too common, like they are in any segment of the economy where there is a scarcity of product and millions of dollars at stake. The contours of many of these scams are familiar: A huckster promises to acquire a vehicle to which they claim to have special access; often the car is difficult to acquire conventionally. Many of these scenarios end the same way: With the police or a lawsuit, and an old lesson relearned about things seeming too good to be true.