A Porsche doesn’t need a chop shop to get stolen from its owner. Sometimes all it takes is a consignment agreement, a trusting seller, and a shop owner willing to treat client cars like a personal line of credit. That’s what federal prosecutors say happened at CPR Classic, a Porsche restoration and resale business in Fallbrook, California, that Andrea Nicole Doherty took over from her father after his death in 2021.
On July 24, a federal judge sentenced Doherty, 38, to 21 months in prison after she pleaded guilty in December to three counts of wire fraud. Read the plea agreement and the pattern isn’t a single bad decision. It’s someone who figured out she could keep selling cars she didn’t fully own, as long as another buyer was willing to wire money first.
Selling One Car Twice, Forging Ownership on Another
Start with the 1972 Porsche 911S. In February 2023, Doherty found a buyer within a day of listing it, and that buyer wired her $280,000 within a week. He got the car. He never got a title, because Doherty never transferred one, and she never paid the seller either. Eight months later, she sold the same 911S again, this time to a different buyer who wired $275,000. Some of that money finally reached the original seller, who then transferred title to the second buyer, unaware his car had already gone home with somebody else months earlier.
That’s not a bookkeeping error. It’s the same mechanical principle that keeps Ponzi schemes running until the music stops: use the newest buyer’s money to quiet down the previous transaction, and hope nobody compares notes before the next sale closes.
The 1983 Porsche 930 Turbo Slantnose case is worse, because it adds forgery to fraud. Doherty sold it on consignment for $130,000 without telling, or paying, the owner, then forged his signature on the title transfer document to make the sale look legitimate. The buyer didn’t discover anything was wrong for more than a year, and only found out after contacting the original owner directly, who was stunned to learn his own car had already changed hands even though CPR Classic’s website still listed it as available for sale.
A third car, a 1973 Porsche 911E Targa, went to two different buyers between 2022 and 2023. When Doherty finally cut the original seller a check to cover what she owed him, it bounced.
A DBA With No Corporate Shield
None of this ran through a faceless dealership with a compliance department double-checking paperwork. CPR Classic operated as a DBA; Doherty never registered it as a corporation or an LLC. That detail matters more than it sounds like it should. Without a corporate shield, there’s no separate legal entity standing between the fraud and Doherty’s personal assets, which is part of why the court could pursue restitution directly against her rather than getting tangled in the kind of asset-hiding maneuvers a shell company can enable. It’s a small consolation for the people she owes money to, and a thin one. Federal restitution orders are notorious for going largely uncollected once a defendant has already spent the money and starts serving a sentence that pays no meaningful wages.
The Restitution Math Nobody Will Actually Collect
U.S. District Judge Andrew G. Schopler ordered Doherty to pay $9,951,763.04 in restitution to 66 victims. She’s accused of personally pocketing a bit more than $827,000 of that total, which means most of the restitution figure reflects money owed across dozens of consignment deals that unraveled once investigators started pulling the thread, not just the three vehicles named in her formal charges. The California DMV suspended CPR Classic’s dealer license in September 2024, effectively ending the business. Twenty-one months is what three wire fraud counts get you in a plea deal; the maximum exposure per count was 20 years and a $250,000 fine, but that was never realistically on the table once Doherty cooperated with investigators from the FBI and the California DMV’s Criminal Investigations division.
Why Classic Porsche Consignment Is Such an Easy Target
Consignment fraud thrives specifically in a market where the cars are worth serious money and the paperwork moves slower than a wire transfer. Nobody casually lists a clean 911S or a Slantnose 930 on a general marketplace. Owners hand the keys and the title to a specialist shop precisely because they don’t want to deal with buyers themselves, and buyers wire money to that same shop because it’s supposed to be the trustworthy middleman. The instant that middleman decides consignment funds are a personal line of credit, the system’s only real safeguard, sequential trust between strangers, collapses.
How Buyers and Sellers Protect Themselves
The fix isn’t complicated, though it does cost a little convenience. Title and payment should move at the same time, ideally through a third-party escrow service that won’t release either side until both obligations are met, the same structure legitimate auction houses use specifically to prevent this scenario. Before consigning a car anywhere, check the shop’s dealer license status directly with the state DMV instead of taking a storefront’s word for it. Title paperwork isn’t a formality; it’s the entire legal record of who owns a car, which is exactly why gaps in that system cause headaches well beyond fraud cases, right down to a stolen Toyota Highlander that disappeared for five years and crossed two international borders before its paperwork finally caught up with it.
CPR Classic isn’t an isolated case, either. A Texas shop owner drew 60 years for a $498,000 engine-swap scam, and a Florida operator was sentenced after a $2.5 million restoration scheme fell apart. Jimmie Johnson’s own brother has been sued twice over unfinished restoration work, and even Ed Sheeran learned that a car sitting untouched in storage doesn’t guarantee a clean ownership situation. Different names, different states, same underlying failure: a corner of the classic car hobby that still runs largely on handshakes and wire transfers, with title paperwork treated as an afterthought instead of the whole point.
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