At 3:45 on the morning of April 9th, Allyn awoke to find his Audi getting towed by a repo man. Thing is, Allyn didn’t owe anyone any money. Rather, his 1999 Audi A4 had the misfortune of being the same color as a 2001 Saab the tow truck driver was looking for. When he got his car back, it wouldn’t start and the bumper was loose. Thus began his series of misadventures in trying to get the towing company to pay for the damage ($5-$8k by dragging an all-wheel-drive car in park for 5 miles) they incurred.
Since the company wouldn’t deal with him honestly, he filed a claim with his insurance company, and they’re going after the towing company.
Moral of the story: Instead of doing the fighting yourself, sometimes it’s better to see if one of the companies you hire (usually an insurance company) would have a vested interested in pursuing your claim (i.e. they get paid). Sic a monster on a monster. — BEN POPKEN
When stealing a car is “legal” [Equal Time Radio]
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@something_amazing: Which justifies illegal trespass and theft how exactly?
@bradg33: No, I have a bias against THIEVING TRESPASSERS who have no right to expect to be able to fix things on THEIR schedule. It’s the VICTIM who gets to choose here.
As for the cop who didn’t do his job? There were multiple witnesses, the guy had the papers to prove the car was his, the citizen said he wanted to press charges, and the cop’s answer was “He’s just doing his job”??? JUST DOING HIS JOB??? You cannot have a job that requires you to steal. The guy’s a crook. No ifs, ands, or buts, and no matter how much you might want to weasel away from that fact, it remains true.
@bradg33 : Yes, I was a bit emotional at the time I wrote that post. I think it pretty much captured the frustration and anger I felt at the time.
I didn’t write the post until that evening, almost 24 hours after the incident. By that time, I had already been through several calls to the manager/agent, and had found out about what this guy had been doing in the background.
He was stalling, and trying to come up with a defense, where there was none. He hoped to convince me that his company couldn’t be responsible because of his “negligent” driver. At one time he tried to tell me there was no “proof” his driver had even taken my car (besides the police seeing it, and the police car video.)
I think he might have assumed that I didn’t have insurance, because I had chosen to talk to him directly. And thinking that, he might have thought he could bluff his way out of it, hoping I would just go away.
I did go away — to my insurance company.
@Nemesis_Enforcer: Did you sue him for destruction of property or at least report him to the postmaster? I’m pretty sure destroying mailboxes is a federal crime.
@Buran: Yepper I reported him to the Police and filed a police report. I went to their office and the manager had me a check in about 2 days from their insurance to cover the costs of getting a new mailbox.
@bradg33:
Repossessing a car involves intent, on the part of the repossessor, to permanently deprive the owner of his or her vehicle. This is permissible when it is done as a lawful repossession; when it is done to a car that has no reason to be repossessed (especially when gross negligence is involved), it damn well is theft.
So, here’s a great case for bad apples spoiling the so-so reputation of an entire industry. Repo companies are an unfortunate necessity in our credit-driven society, since many people don’t pay either out of sheer disregard for the obligation they undertook when they borrowed the money, or because they have run into financial difficulties they may not have foreseen at the time they made the purchase. Some people actually are smart enough to protect their credit by arranging to turn over the property to their creditor (not a perfect solution but it looks better than a repo) but most just ignore the problem or worse, try to hide from it.
So you have here an industry tasked with recovering property from people who aren’t interested in giving it back to its rightful owner (their creditor, after they’ve defaulted.) This is not going to be a popular business with anyone except the creditors (even though its existence indirectly helps keep costs lower for those of us who pay off our loans.) Then you have the bottom-feeders in a bottom-feeding industry like the driver who illegally towed and damaged the Audi, making it look like the entire industry is operating at the level of the sleaziest bozo. The tow driver in this case shouldn’t have been in the truck at all, because he obtained his job fraudulently (per the report that he’d forged his driving record and had actually been fired by several similar businesses.) The owner of the company should have behaved more honestly, and deserves the significantly costs to his bank account and his reputation for not doing due diligence before sending the driver out as his agent, and for not owning up to that mistake with the owner of the Audi.
@GearheadGeek: I agree fully with everything you said. I am NOT down on the industry itself — they are a necessary ‘evil’ that makes it easier for the rest of us to obtain credit at a fairly reasonable rate.
Since this has happened, I have done a little checking into this industry, and towing companies in general. I am surprised by what I have found:
You would expect that any employer offering jobs that required driving would do a records check to see what a person’s driving record was like prior to hiring. Tow companies typically do not, only asking that their prospective drivers obtain their own driving abstract.
Since it is a requirement in every state to have drivers’ insurance, you would expect that the company would obtain such insurance prior to sending a person out in one of their vehicles. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case either. A company isn’t required to obtain insurance for their drivers until sixty days after their hiring — at which time the tow companies will find out whether their drivers have a license, and/or a bad driving record.
Most don’t check to see if their drivers have a criminal record or not. What better ‘front’ for a car thief than to have a job repossessing cars? It’s like hiring an embezzler to work as a teller in a bank.
I asked a question in my original post that nobody seemed to have an answer for:
Assuming this was a ‘mistake’, and the driver had not been followed and caught up with several miles down the road, what do you think he would have done once he ‘discovered’ his ‘mistake’?
a) Would he have dumped the car down some dimly lit road and make everyone think that this was just a theft?
b) Would he have snuck the car back to where he got it and left it there for the owner to deal with all of the damage?
c) Would he have notified the owner and his boss of his ‘mistake’?
How many of you would have picked “C”?
@DJ Allyn: I’m sure the most likely option is “a”, since it poses the least risk to the driver. Especially considering the fact that your alarm went off as he towed off your car, you’re likely to be outside talking to cops when he shows up with the car so there’s no way he’s going to choose b, even though it’s slightly less sleazy than a. The only way he’s going to pick c is if his brother or dad is the owner of the company, and then only to tell them to help him cover it up.
I also think it’s interesting that the requirements in the industry are as lax as you described for qualifying and insuring drivers. My partner is a paramedic, and he had to obtain an official, certified copy of his driving record from the state before he was allowed to drive an ambulance for the county service where he works. This may be their requirement, rather than a state requirement, but you’d think for liability purposes a tow company would want to be sure that people acting as their agents (and these drivers definitely seem to fall under agency law) are insurable and have a fairly clean driving record.
Then again, it may be hard to find people who are willing to take the kinds of risks these guys do even when they’re operating legally, at least in Texas you can shoot someone taking your property at night and get away with it most of the time, and I’m guessing lots of their repos are done at night.
@velocipenguin: I still do not think this act, without some other form of proof or substantiation. I still feel that it lacks any form of intent to actually take the wrong vehicle. I agree that there was negligence involved, but I do not think theft is the right word. According to law.com’s legal dictionary, “the generic term for all crimes in which a person intentionally and fraudulently takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker’s use (including potential sale)”. The only part of that definition that this case meets is “without permission”, but there was no intent to convert the Audi for his use or sale. He took the wrong car because he was a lazy screwup, but that does not make the man a thief.
@bradg33: I have an update on this. Tonight the sheriff’s deputy came to my house to inform me that the driver is being charged with First Degree Malicious Mischief, Taking and Riding Motor Vehicle without Owner’s Permission, and First Degree Theft.
The driver is on the run, but he is being charged with stealing the GPS unit out of the truck, and some expense money the towing company had given him.
The company itself is now saying that this driver had never been assigned to repossess a Saab, nor was there any records of me or my address in their system. The manager/agent is trying to tell the police that this is some kind of a scam perpetrated by ME, and that there is no way they can be responsible because THEY don’t have any record in their system linking me or my car to their work orders.
I have contacted the bank who issued the repossession order, and they are faxing me the copy tomorrow.
Talk about a slime bucket. There are seven witnesses, four of them cops, and a CCTV video and photographs showing the truck taking off with my car and returning it.
If he was never sent out to repo a Saab, or anything in that area, that changes the situation quite a bit. The really bad thing is, though your insurance is picking up the tab now, that if in fact the tow driver was operating outside of his “job”, or “off the reservation” for lack of a better term, there is a reasonable chance the tow company will not be liable.
@DJ_Allyn: Since it sounds like you’re in the Seattle area, you might want to get in touch with Bob Branham at KIRO TV News. They might be interested in this story for their consumer reports segment.
@bradg33: Actually it doesn’t change anything, even if the guy was sent out to repo a purple F350 SuperDuty with yellow polkadots. The owner of the repo company sent this nimrod out as his agent in a company truck, and he proved to be a bad risk. If the guy had stolen the company truck, the owner of the company might be able to get out of it and leave DJ_Allyn’s insurance company holding the bag, but this employee of the repo company was acting as an agent of said company, so the repo company is liable for this action, even if they didn’t specifically send him to DJ_Allyn’s address or tell him to tow and damage the A4.
Nice that the driver’s theft of the GPS unit and petty cash probably carry a higher penalty than his actions that caused $8k of damage to the A4.
If someone “accidentally” repos my toyota or my mom’s lexus, I’m gonna call Allstate and Allstate can sue them out of business. I’ll tell Allstate legal counsel to MAKE SURE the two-timing lowlife towing company goes out of business and then owes me money.
I have worked in the vehicle recovery industry for 5 years now. The company I work for has very strict standards as far as the drivers they hire which includes stringent background checks and driving records before you are hired. Not all companys do this for the simple fact that they just need some one in a truck to do their work. I have seen our drivers damage vehicles and the companys repo insurance is required to repair it and the driver is responsible for the $1000 deductible on the repairs. A company is required to carry insurance on any vehicle they pick up, wether it be the correct vehicle or not. An instance like this could cause a company to loose thier insurance on the cars they recover, which will cost them clients. Alot of recovery agents are shady and often times take the wrong vehicle, often fords because of the repeated use of the last 8 digits of a vin on various years. In my 5 yrs with this company I have seen only 2 of the wrong vehicles repossesd. One was because of the vin issue with fords, and the other was a bank mistake when a vehicle was traded in and not transferred over to the new owner through the same finance company. Alot of recovery companys make a driver sign a waiver holding the company harmless if a driver damages a vehicle in the process of repossesion and makes the driver responsible.