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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.
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.