There are documented cases of Tesla selling a pre-owned vehicle that was purchased with an optional feature, listing that optional feature in the sale ad, and then disabling the feature after the person they sold the car to has taken possession.

Yep, here's the article about it.

https://electrek.co/2020/02/07/tesla-takes-away-autopilot-us...

That sucks. Got a link by chance?

That's definitely not a standard practice, but I can see how that would happen by mistake (e.g. forget to remove FSD from the spec sheet) and then be difficult to get fixed. It's near-impossible to reach the right human at Tesla, so when things fall through the cracks, it's a nightmare. I suspect that's the issue OP is quoting, too -- there's likely a reasonable person at Tesla who can and would help if they knew about this story.

Link to one story is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32244975

My mistake, thanks for the correction; edited (leaving my error for prosperity, and so the replies make sense). I added another bullet point to make up for it. :-)