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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.
Applying Hillary Clinton logos and decals to my car and trading it in.
BRB.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/66d1d3ec-2f19-11e0-88ec-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3uLdcGolO
FTFA:
In a statement...Toyota added: “It is not our proudest piece of product placement. But it shows the Taliban are looking for the same qualities as any other truck buyer: quality and durability.”
That's a bold pivot to a positive message. Maybe the plumber can lean in and tell customers if he can put up with ISIS's shit, he can put up with theirs.
Dance like you're hurt, Love like you need money, and work when somebody's watching.
-Scott Adams
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?
That is very likely. Dealerships contract out people all the time to install pin striping and other specialty logos. Remember all those fancy graphics on Toyota trucks in the 80s? They didn't leave the factory like that, I worked in a dealership then. These guys know exactly how to remove the old sticks from other dealerships or company logos without leaving a film or scratch. The dealer just got lazy and wholesaled it out. It probably isn't illegal (although it probably was a lie), but it is very bad business.
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this is slashdot... do you have to ask?
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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.
The defendant, however, says he mentioned it 2 or 3 times.
So is the US Treasury. They are actively investigating why ISIS has so many Toyota's. There are so many of them, this is a quote from the article: “Regrettably, the Toyota Land Cruiser and Hilux have effectively become almost part of the ISIS brand,” said Mark Wallace, a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
Whenever I see another one of those Daesh videos, I have always wondered where that rogue Toyota dealership is so we can wipe it out. Who know that it was in Texas?
The solution is full-disk encryption.
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.
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I think it's obvious where he'll be sending that million...
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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?
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.
Because Land Rovers cost a LOT more.
If only I had mod points: +1 Funny.
Unless you were being serious? ... yah, not so much.
British cars might be "simple and solid" but "reliable and easy to work on"
What are you trying to say? That the used car dealer was dishonest?
Wow. What is the world coming to.
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...
That reminds me of the guy in California named "Al Nino" who used to get hateful calls every time the weather forecasters started talking about how "El Nino" might ruin crops this year or whatever. Seriously, people would call him and curse him out for "fucking up the weather".
And also, there was that poor bastard named "Al Cayda", who's received a similar boatload of shit for the last decade or so.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I didn't say "reliable". Also Land Rovers are very simple compared to the British cars that have the reputation of being hard to work on. Many owners typically do work on them themselves.
I don't worry so much about the decals, but it's bordering on irresponsible by the dealer to not remove the plumber's machine gun before reselling the truck.
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?...
You can keep the Land Rovers.
The problem with European makes is that they assume that one is going to have a garage with the exact tools needed to do upkeep, the exact spec lubricants, and that everyone who works on the vehicle has been to the factory to take training and certification courses. The concept of a "shade-tree mechanic" is not in their playbook.
But in the real world, that can't be done often. In general, American and Japanese cars are engineered to be more forgiving if the right tool isn't in place. For example, on an old US brand pickup, the headlight assembly dim and faded. $50 later, I had a pair of OEM spec assemblies, and it took lifting a single lever and tugging on a cable to replace both of them. If I wanted to do that with the nearby German car, it would have cost thousands and required a shop visit.
Even a battery change. Chevy? Yank cables, pull out old battery, put new one in, put cables on, it starts. One European make, I found out the hard way that if the battery ever gets disconnected, the vehicle will not start and has to be towed to the shop for the battery to be "registered" with the vehicle's computer.
Nothing wrong with European vehicles. You buy a Mercedes, you pay Mercedes prices for parts and labor. However, European vehicles have no tolerance for oddball stuff. For example, one European make will void the warranty if more than 5% biodiesel is run. However, here in the US, it can go up to B20 without any notifications, with B10-B12 being the norm. So, pretty much, every make of that diesel vehicle has no engine warranty. Domestic brands can swallow B20, no issue.
You live in a world without backups? How terrifying.
LOL - I suggest you set eyes on a Land Rover in the real world, you'll never compare it to a Mercedes after that.
The long story is that it's a British upgrade of a wartime Jeep and it hasn't changed a lot since.
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
And think about all the people who already did business with him. They were customers of a business that supported Isis. How will their reputation ever be restored? They should all get $1M as well.
He was happy to leave the decals on there when he thought he might get some free local advertising. Ultimately though he sold the vehicle with them on there, but didn't retain any control over the vehicle post sale. It's his own fault.
Where did you come up with that? The article clearly stated that his son attempted to remove them....
"Mr. Oberholtzer’s son started peeling off the decal on the truck that showed the phone number and name of the company, but the salesman told him to stop"
Just another day in Paradise
No, because you can only blame yourself. Or al-Baghdadi, good luck in suing him.
This is America, surely I could sue the makers of the shirt, or facebook. You just have to have a little creativity.
He was happy to leave the decals on there
No, he was not. He was in the process of removing them and was instructed by the dealership to cease their removal, and the same person who ordered him to stop also promised to have them removed so that he wouldn't have to. They failed to keep up their end of a verbal contract.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Now that he's made the papers and news, he'll get more attention as a side-effect and get companies due to the sympathy dollar. He shouldn't change his business name at all or at least make sure the old number is forwarded to his new number. He's accomplished the goal given to him by his lawyer and, likely, crisis management/PR advisor he's hired for just this occasion. Those two are the first two calls you should make when something like this happens and both are available at fairly low prices with the latter working on contingency.
He's not going to win this amount of money. He's not going to collect much of what he does win in a timely fashion. His lawyer's going to take a good portion of this money. The winnings, because they're substituting income lost, will probably be considered taxable income. The suit's got not a damned thing to do with winning dollars. Even if he changes the business name, that too will get loads of publicity and the old number will probably stay working and listed. He's gonna be just fine and is doing the "right" thing.
If you get bad PR you call a lawyer and you call a PR or reputation manager to come advise you - even if you're not going to sue, you want a lawyer. You want a PR advisor because they'll help you get out from under this or, in many cases, spin it to a positive. In this case, it's very clever spinning but rather run of the mill. I've never had to deal with it personally but I have some peers who have - you see it sometimes in local restaurants and things of that nature. It's usually a bit more low-key than this but reputations are much easier to repair than people on Slashdot seem to think.
An example might be that I try to avoid all Sony products knowingly. I have since the rootkit days. Yeah... That's doing me a lot of good. Boy, that really harmed that company. Six months later, people saw a Sony product and didn't even think about why they'd heard the name before. They just remembered that Sony was something that someone was talking about so it must be good. We're humans. We're not reason machines but we're pretty good at reasoning. This company has far more advertisement and far more effective advertisement than he could ever hope to pay for. He's either a genius or has paid for a professional. There's a slim chance that he's gotten shit lucky but I'm almost certain that this smells like a professional reputation manager's work.
It's truly brilliant work on their behalf and a good indication of why you should hire one if you're having issues. Some of them are quite good. A restaurateur friend of mine, to go back to the beginning(ish), had a power outage and the generators did not kick in. This went partially unnoticed and the walk-in thingy (not quite a walk-in with a door but has plastic flap thingies, got warmer than it should have. He ended up shutting down because they found maggots in the food - none were served as far as anyone knows. Anyhow, the press had a field day and it was a few days cleaning and getting things squared away. But, he stayed closed just a wee bit longer than he needed to... Why? Well...
He hired a professional, as advised by his lawyer, and they changed the seating arrangement while giving out $5 coupons to the first 50 people to visit the following Friday night. The place was packed, the average entree was like $15 at the time, and was a hit not long after that. The coupon AND the obvious change (the seating) was enough for the customers to assume something was different and changed. Reality was, just the generator had been fixed, cleaned the freezer and bleached it out, and gave his staff a couple of extra days to get a few other jobs done while the place was empty. It worked wonders and, really, the only thing he did was clean up the mess and get the generator fixed.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I think you missed the part where this texan plumber's truck was featured in the Colbert Report, a segment which was rebroadcast primetime during the emmys, therefore making the subset of people who watched the video and and connected the truck to the business into the millions.
The article also mentions that Homeland Security and the FBI met with him and advised him to carry a gun due to the hundreds of daily calls and threats he was receiving. There is cause for him to be concerned with his safety here.
You see it on MSNBC's commentary shows. Fox does it during their news shows. They were actually sued for this. It's not legal to pass commentary off as news. They successfully defended themselves by declaring they were not in fact a News Channel and were an entertainment network.
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I think most people can appreciate that not all things with the same name are related. I remember the band Anthrax considered changing their name after 9/11 when all the anthrax letters were being sent to congress and news stations. They ultimately decided to keep their name, and that decision was regarded as a stand against terrorism (although it later turned out to be just a guy that worked for the US government, and unrelated to the 9/11 attacks).
Issis is still a nice name, I think she should keep it so the terrorists don't win.
Yes I limited myself to the dumb viewers of the cable news outlet that specializes in Islamophobia. I totally agree that people who watch other news outlets are dumb as well, but Fox News is the gold standard of stupidity. If stupid news viewers were baseball teams, Fox News viewers would be the Yankees.