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Texas Plumber Sues Car Dealer After His Truck Ends Up In Videos of Syria's Front Lines (mashable.com)
New submitter hydrodog writes: A Texas plumber traded in his truck, which ended up in ISIS videos showing his logo and phone number. Now he is getting hundreds of harassing phone calls for 'supporting ISIS' and is suing the dealership for not taking off his information before selling it. He is seeking more than $1 million in damages. According to Mashable: "According to the complaint, filed last week, a salesman at the dealership, Edgar Vasquez, told Oberholtzer 'not to worry about the decal,' saying that peeling it off would 'blemish the vehicle paint.' 'At no time did Vasquez or any other agent, servant, or employee of the Defendant tell Plaintiff that Defendant would leave the decals on the truck, which would be transferred in some fashion to international jihadists conducting warfare upon innocents in Syria,' reads the complaint.
A better question is how the hell this vehicle somehow ended up being shipped to the middle east where it could be sold to ISIS?
Because the dealership specifically stopped him when he started to do so, and promised to remove it themselves before they resold it?
How is this frivolous? The salesman said that they would remove the logo because the former owner would damage the paint doing it himself and failed to do so.
My first thought was that he should have worried about the logo before selling it. Evidently, he did worry about it and was supposed to be taken care of by the dealership as part of the sale (trade in is a sale in its own right but was conditioned on the purchase of a different vehicle linking both )
Or at least that is the plumber's side of the story.
If you have a somewhat successful business where you can afford trucks and employees, you could easily rake in 1M or more in a year. If your business goes bust or you have to invest into a media campaign or change your phone numbers or even a major decline in customers due to someone else's major fuck-up (if not plain illegal actions, trading with those nations in the US is strictly forbidden), 1M is not too little to ask.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I think it would be difficult to lose $1M in business over this. There is the set of people who have seen this video. There is the subset of those people who are motivated enough to connect that truck to a particular business. There is a further subset of people dumb enough to assume that this company necessarily supports Isis and/or is not able/willing to discover that the previous owner of this truck is not an Isis supporter. Then there are the set of people who are this company's current/future customers. What is the intersection of these 2 very small sets of people?
It's not ridiculously high. The man and his business's reputation cannot be restored to its former state and other than suffering a monetary slam, the dealer can do nothing to help with that.
How about the legitimate customers who were afraid to use his business because of what their neighbours might think? It takes a lot less than "Oh, is that the ISIS guy?" to kill a business in small town America. And what about the customers who tried to get through, but due to the hundreds of crank calls, couldn't get through and switched to another plumber, thereby losing current and future business?
Most small non-internet businesses are basically out of business without usable phones, and if this business is anything like my plumber, his number is stickered to every single piece of major work his company has done since 1984, and changing his number would undo all of that marketing effort. I'm certain I'm not the only one that calls the company that did the installation when I need service, at least if I'm happy with the original work -- Even if it's not a warranty issue, I know they deal with all of the brands of equipment installed, and they aren't going to claim the original installation was defective and charge me an arm and a leg fixing made-up issues with the original installation either.
$1M isn't much actual damages for current and future business, and some punitive damages would seem to be in order if the dealership failed to remove the logo as contracted, if that was part of the arrangement (which, admittedly, will likely be difficult to prove)
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
Mistakes:
1). Taking a car dealer, a used car dealer, at their word;
2). Thinking you have any rights after the vehicle sale. You have none!
3). Most used vehicle sales are performed "as is". Why would you think this was any different on the buyer side than you position as the seller?
Consider this a lesson in real world commerce. Next time remove your own decals and tell the dealer to F-off regarding his opinions and/or offers on the matter.
His life and his family's lives, and his business have all been put at risk. Tell us why you think the amount is frivolous? Oh, you meant frivolously low.
Just another day in Paradise
Fox does not report any particular fact inaccurately [without an excuse]. Instead, what it does is pick and choose which facts to report in order to imply a misleading conclusion. It also carefully chooses who to interview, so that slick, well-spoken Republicans can have a "fair and balanced" debate against the most moronic Democrat they can get their hands on. Moreover, when those Republican interviewees blatantly lie, the anchors can repeat that "[person] said [claim], and he seems very credible" over and over again. The anchor never technically lied -- [person] did say [claim] -- but the anchor is complicit in spreading the lie.
Not saying it makes it right, but you see the same thing on CNN and MSNBC for the democrats (well MSNBC doesn't try to pretend it's fair.)
MSBC presents less factually based content than any other cable news channel.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K