On Tuesday, Antoinette Jordan experienced every mother’s worst nightmare. After picking up her children from an Orlando daycare, she came back out to find that her car—along with her 9-month-old daughter—had disappeared. Jordan told reporters: "I thought somebody kidnapped her because my oldest daughter said, 'It was two white males [who] got in the car and they just left.'" Thankfully, this story isn’t tragic, but it is repulsive. It turns out that Jordan was three days late on a car payment, and the car had been repossessed. This doesn’t change the fact that two strangers took a baby. WESH Orlando has been covering the story, and after the frantic mother called 911 and the daycare went on lockdown, Orlando police were able to locate the car and about four miles away at Xpress Finance and General Auto. What kind of car dealership repossesses a car on account of a three-days-late payment of $199? Xpress Finance is what is known as a buy-here pay-here dealership (BHPH), which means that they both sell the cars and handle financing. They specialize in selling to customers with bad credit, i.e., people who have literally no other option for purchasing a car. According to AutoTrader.com, BHPH dealerships are very likely to give just about anyone with steady income a loan, and that loan will come with double-digit interest. The customer will also have to pay back the loan in-person by cash or money order. As you can imagine, these circumstances make timely car payments extremely difficult, especially, I’d imagine, for a mother of three small children. BHPH dealers know how difficult this is, and they make their money not only from the sky-high interest they’re charging customers, but also from the fact that they know they’ll be repossessing a good number of the cars they sell due to the extremely rigid payback circumstances they create. At this point, the vehicle can be resold to another desperate buyer. A 2011 LA Times article delved into the world of the BHPH scam:

About 1 in 4 buyers default. In the real estate and credit card industries, that would be bad news. In the world of Buy Here Pay Here, it's just another avenue for profit: The car can be repossessed and put back on the lot for sale in short order. A new buyer makes a down payment, takes on a high-interest loan and the cycle starts anew.

Provided they don't get wrecked, these recycled vehicles just keep paying dividends. At some dealerships, cars have been sold and resold over and over — three, four, even eight times apiece, motor vehicle records show.

Google “buy here pay here” and you’ll be confronted with hundreds of offers for supposed miracle-loans despite bad credit. Websites for these dealerships proclaim their good-hearted generosity, as in the case of Prestige Auto Mart in Massachusetts. For an unsuspecting customer, it would be hard to read the following and not think that your prayers are being answered:

Here at Prestige Auto Mart, we understand that there is good people out there that have had some bad luck along the way.  This is why we offer a full credit re-establishment program from our renowned Buy Here Pay Here program.

If fact, we own a full Finance and Leasing program for those less fortunate.  Of course, the program does require a little money down, but we guarantee financing, or the car is free!

How nice! Not only do you get a car, but these kind people are going to help you rebuild your credit! Of course, Yelp reviews of Prestige paint a different picture, and the web is littered with people’s accounts of when the BHPH experience sours and the endless harassment begins. AmeriCredit (owned by General Motors) is one company that supplies these sketchy dealers with the funds to provide the even-sketchier loans, and it seems there’s nothing they won’t do to recover their money. Reading through a list of complaints about AmeriCredit’s treatment of people (by which I mean human beings who are deserving of basic respect) on ConsumerAffairs.com is not a feel-good experience. I can really only recommend it if you’ve recently eaten something poisonous and need to vomit to prevent death, or if you really like being sad. A few examples:    Back to Antoinette Jordan. The good news is that Xpress Finance Inc. is very sorry about the Orlando incident, saying, "The rules are the rules." Oh, wait. They’re actually terrible, soulless, unrepentant garbage. Right. The rules are that if you are three days late on a car payment, then kidnapping is reasonable. Florida law says that repossession is totally fine under basically any circumstances, and somehow this creates a gray area in which it’s OK to steal infants without the knowledge of their mothers. The men who drove off with Antoinette Jordan’s daughter won’t face charges. So if you’re a baby, you’d better just not accompany your mother on errands. Maybe you should have thought about that, cute little baby. In today’s economy (and in a car culture), a car is oftentimes not an option. You simply need to have one to hold down a job, take care of your kids, etc. Before you think about casting a stone in Antoinette Jordan’s direction, consider that 1 in 5 of you have credit that’s bad enough to force you to use a BHPH dealer, and the only difference between you and this Florida mother may be that you were lucky enough to already have a car before your credit went south. So sure, rules are rules, but in what kind of world does a shady business missing $199 mean that you can’t even take an infant out of a car before repossessing it? If you can avoid using a BHPH dealership, please so do at all costs. If you can’t, Business Insider offers some tips on how to avoid the worst of them, and here are some additional resources: Buying a Car with Bad Credit - What NOT to do Are There Car Loans for People with Bad Credit? Federal Trade Commission: Coping with Debt Federal Trade Commission: Buying & Owning a Car