Owner of Notorious Dealer CNC Motors Charged With Embezzlement, Tax Fraud

Back in 2021, something unusual started happening at CNC Motors, an exotic car dealership with a good reputation outside of Los Angeles. Dozens of individuals who had consigned their vehicles with the dealer reported their cars were sold without their knowledge, and they had received no compensation. We did a full report on what was happening when the entire situation was still unfolding a few years ago, and now everything has caught up to the dealer's owner, Clayton Thom.

On November 1, California Attorney General Rob Bonta charged Thom with 37 counts of grand theft and one count of elder theft, as well as 13 counts of tax fraud shared with his business manager, Valerie Tanaka. The Attorney General's office says Thom "was allegedly involved in the theft of over $4 million from 35 victims," and also "[defrauded] the State of California of more than $4 million in taxes."

CNC Motors entered the public eye in a big way after several of the vehicles it had for sale were featured in videos by YouTuber Doug DeMuro, who said he started hearing about the rumors of something fishy going on soon after he effectively ended his association with the dealer. "At some point during COVID, my closest contacts stopped working there, so I didn't really have anyone to reach out to about coming up (in retrospect, this was probably red flag number one)," DeMuro wrote on Reddit in March of 2021. "They also started running out of cars for me to film, as they mainly had new-ish used exotics and I had done most of that stuff. Then I started hearing some of these rumors..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoihSOhWO3Q