CHARLOTTE, N.C.,None — Robbie Caddell knows he should've seen it coming -- the salesman who pulled up alongside him in an uptown Charlotte parking lot was just a little too slick.
"He had done this little show, this little performance, other times," Caddell said Tuesday.
The "show" was a sales pitch for a home theater projector and it played out in the parking lot of Mecklenburg County's Hal Marshall building.
By the time it was over, Caddell had paid $1,000 for the Crystal Home Theater projector, and it wasn't until he got it home that he discovered it wasn't close to what he'd expected.
"It's probably one quarter the resolution, and all of the standards are subpar for today's standard in home projectors," Caddell said. On top of that, he said, the projector quit working all together 15 minutes after he plugged it in.
It wasn't until he went online, though, that he found the warnings about what's called the "White Van Scam" and the man who had sold him the projector -- a Mooresville man named Patrick Neal Weddington.
With a little research, Caddell found out that Weddington had been arrested in Charlotte in 2010 for failing to install a system he'd sold to a south Charlotte man for $800.
Eyewitness News went through court records and discovered that prosecutors had dismissed that charge after Weddington paid that money back, but many other complaints about Weddington online have not been resolved and Caddell is still looking for his money.
"He said that he had a strict ‘no refund' policy, which he didn't say when we made the exchange," Caddell said.
Eyewitness News reached Weddington by phone but he said he did not have time to discuss his business.
Police added another warning, saying in most cases they cannot file criminal charges.
"He offered a product. The other person accepted it by providing payment for it," fraud Detective Derrick Mayo said. "So it's buyer beware."