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.

Comments

Re:Truck traded in USA ends up in Syria how?

[Mashiki]

Oh you'd be surprised at the amount of stolen cars being shipped out. The only search something like 2% of cargo containers right now, and shipping out a two stolen cars with one legit car happens quite a bit. Kind of like how here in the Americas, car thieves will buy a wrecked vehicle(usually water damaged or salvage), swipe the VIN, then slap it onto a stolen car. Which is why you check dashboard VIN against the other stamped VIN's on the vehicle parts(windows, doors, transmission, engine, body panels, subframe etc) when you buy. Hell there was a dealership here in Ontario that bought up a bunch of cheap vehicles and had them all seized because they were stolen, and they didn't double check to see if there was matching/mismatched VIN's.

If someone is runs a legit repair, seeing 4-5 VINs is common since they're removing parts from one salvage vehicle to another and then reselling a repaired vehicle. Of course, you need to check those VINs to make sure that they weren't stolen too, since chopshops do exist.

Toyota is good for jihad

[Anonymous Coward]

In 1997, Robert Fisk interviewed Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan, as described in his book The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. But first, he had to get there.

...we set off up the track that Osama bin Laden built during his jihad against the Russian army in the early 1980s, a terrifying, slithering, two-hour odyssey along fearful ravines in rain and sleet, the windscreen misting as we climbed the cold mountain....

The road grew worse as we continued, the 4×4 skidding backwards towards sheer cliffs, the headlights playing across the chasms on either side. "Toyota is good for jihad," my driver said. I could only agree, noting that this was one advertising slogan the Toyota company would probably forgo.

Wade Hoyt is the best PR spokesman EVER!

[BringMyShuttle]

LMAO Non paywalled link: Wade Hoyt, Toyota's spokesman in New York, who put the best corporate spin on the situation this week. "It is not our proudest product placement," he said. "But it shows that the Taliban are looking for the same qualities as any truck buyer: durability and reliability." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11... http://www.bloombergview.com/a... Top Gear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Toyota has always had this problem

[budgenator]

This guy traded in a Ford F250, which is a medium duty full sized pickup truck with a 300HP engine vs, the toyota Hiluz a light duty compact pickup with a 150 Hp engine. The toyota has a hard time hauling a 12.5mm machinegun, that antiaircraft gun would definitely break it's back, I'd bet the F250 doesn't last long with that thing onboard. The gun is going to have no accuracy, after the first round the whole truck is going to rocking all over the place.
Here's my version
1. Get a bunch of F250's Mossy Oak Desert Camo specials,
2. Sell to Turkish Used car Salesmen.
3. Have onboard Sync send emails with truck's GPS location to IhateTerrorists@CIA.gov every day
4. Have the trucks engine shutdown every time an A10 or F16 comes within 10Km of truck