Buying a car at a city auction is supposed to be one of the safer ways to land a deal. The vehicle has been seized, processed, and put up for public sale by a government that’s supposed to have its paperwork in order. So when a man in the Cincinnati area bid $35,000 on a 2014 Porsche Panamera, he probably figured the hard part was writing the check. He had no idea he was buying a stolen car from the people whose entire job is to catch stolen cars.
The City of Cincinnati has now agreed to pay nearly $16,000 to Srinivasa Gowda to settle a lawsuit over exactly that. Gowda bought the Panamera at a public auction in December 2021. The car had been seized by Cincinnati police in connection with a drug case — the kind of detail that would normally make a buyer feel more confident, not less, about where a car really came from.
The VIN That Told a Different Story
Once the real VIN was traced, the answer was ugly: the Porsche had been reported stolen out of the Atlanta area. Gowda was now sitting on a car that belonged to someone else, even though he’d paid the city full price for it in an open, legal auction. He did what any reasonable buyer would do — in 2023, he went back to the city and asked for a full refund. The city said no, with officials arguing Cincinnati was immune from liability, essentially claiming the government doesn’t have to answer for selling a stolen vehicle to one of its own residents.
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The Part That Really Stings
Here’s the part that matters. To actually keep the Porsche he’d already paid $35,000 for, Gowda had to pay another $10,000 — money that went to the original owner’s insurance company, which had already reimbursed the theft victim and was demanding the car back. Gowda was caught in the middle of a mess he didn’t create: he bought the car in good faith from the city, then had to pay a second party just to avoid losing it entirely.
Think about that math for a second. He’s out the auction price, plus another five-figure payment to an insurer, all because the city auctioned off a vehicle with a doctored VIN and then tried to wash its hands of the whole thing. This wasn’t a buyer trying to pull a fast one — this was a buyer eating loss after loss for the city’s failure to verify what it was selling.
The Legal Fight
Gowda filed his lawsuit in 2024, seeking a refund of the money he paid. His attorney, Steven Shane, framed the case as a straightforward breach of contract. The argument was clean: when the city accepted Gowda’s winning bid at the auction, a contract was formed between the two of them, and the city took his money while handing over a car it couldn’t legally sell.
The city pushed back by claiming no enforceable contract ever existed in the first place — not just a technicality, but the foundation of its immunity defense. Shane countered that because the dispute was a contract claim, state law didn’t let the city hide behind governmental immunity at all. That distinction is the whole ballgame here, since immunity is the wall public bodies usually lean on to avoid paying out. Once the case was framed as a contract, that wall got a lot shorter.
How It Ended
The city signed the settlement agreement, worth $15,870, on May 21. A court entry filed June 8 in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court shows Gowda agreed to dismiss his lawsuit. The Enquirer obtained the settlement through a public records request, and the dollar figure lands close to the extra costs Gowda was forced to absorb, which tells you something about how the two sides finally landed on a number.
Why Enthusiasts Should Care
For anyone who buys cars at government auctions, this case is a warning. A private sale doesn’t carry the same assumed credibility, but a government auction does, and buyers lean on that. They assume the title is clean and the VIN is real because the seller is the city itself. This case shows that assumption can blow up in your face, and that getting made whole can take a lawsuit and years of waiting.
It also raises a harder question about accountability. If a city can sell a stolen Porsche, refuse a refund, and only pay up after being dragged through court, what protects the next buyer who doesn’t have the patience or the attorney to fight? The settlement closes Gowda’s case, but it does nothing to fix the gap that let a stolen car with a fake VIN get sold by the very people who seized it.