$16,000 Scammer Gets Owned

As promised, a slightly lighter topic than global war for my next post back.

For the last few days, I have been following a post on a performance car forum, found at http://www.tamparacing.com/forums/general-car-chat/504615-attn-joe-dono-aka-scp_celica-scammer.html. In it, a young man named Joe is getting called out and destroyed for trying to reclaim his modified Celica from the shop while ducking $16,000 in labour.

To summarize the story, as reading the thread at this point would take days, and even though the amount of ownage that’s going on is amusing, it isn’t THAT amusing, Joe brought his base automatic Celica into the shop more than half a year ago, initially for a custom paint job. While it was in the shop, he kept adding things to it, custom audio setup, body parts, minor engine modifications, and so on. They kept doing the work, as Joe kept paying for the parts, insisting that his “sponsors” and grandfather would pay for the balance when completed. Apparently he claimed that his grandfather was “old school”, and wouldn’t pay until the car was complete.

Then came crunch time. The car was essentially finished, and apparently was signed up to be in a car show. Joe sent his mom to go pick up the car, not telling her that the work hadn’t been paid for. The shop refused to release the car. He then sent his girlfriend, who offered a $60 down payment to release the car, and asked to setup some sort of payment plan. Clearly, with the amount of money involved, they refused this as well. Finally, he called and asked them to wash, wax, and polish the car, and leave it sitting out in front of the shop.

At this point, the owner of the shop, Aaron, posted the situation on the message board, warning the board members that Joe was a scammer, and detailing the situation. This is where things got interesting. Aaron detailed that he was putting a mechanics lien on the car (which in my opinion, is for more than the car’s even worth). Joe posted on the board that since he didn’t own the car (his mom does, even though the man’s 20), and they were two months behind in their payments with the bank, that the lien wouldn’t do him any good, and to “mark my words, I’ll have the car by Friday”. At this point, the board, and then the Internet, exploded. First, people openly derided Joe, then arguments went back and forth about work orders vs. verbal agreements. At this point, people started posting links to the thread on other message boards.

Word spread. People jumped in, saying Joe had tried to scam somebody a year earlier on another car forum by trying to buy a 350Z with four credit cards that weren’t in his name. Someone else reported that Joe had sold them a $1200 MacBook Pro that turned out to be an iBook G4 with a dead battery. Someone else said that Joe had approached them about doing work to “his” Celica, but wasn’t willing to bring the car in for an estimate, only to drop it off to get the work done. It turned out that the man had been jailed before for fraud. People started picking apart his photo submissions, and found that many of the photos he had watermarked as being “his” photography were stolen.

The flip side of the story is the shop. They did $16,000 worth of work on word of mouth, investing all of their time working on the Celica, in effect spending both their professional and personal funds on it. The owners claim that without the payday of the Celica, the shop will be forced to close almost immediately, and they will be unable to make their mortgage payments or provide for their families. They are now accepting donations (at the prompting of the board members, not themselves) to go towards legal fees for the upcoming court battle to claim this guy’s mom’s car.

Joe is an idiot, and if 1/10th what has been shown on the Internet is true, is getting everything that he deserves. If you google his full name, threads talking about this attempted scam fill the entire first page. He’s done irreparable damage to his reputation, and perhaps he will finally learn a lesson from this experience.

But these shop owners have a lot to answer for as well. I understand the challenges of starting a small business. In fact, my understanding is exactly why I didn’t take my Entrepreneurship class’ advice and start my own. Things are tight for a long time, and more than half of all new businesses fail. There are two owners who are claiming that without this big “pay day”, their shop is going to immediately fold, and they won’t even be able to make rent so to speak. One has to look at this situation with a cold eye to see that this doesn’t make sense. My heart goes out to these guys in this situation, they have been screwed. But my mind does not, because let’s be frank - $16,000 is not a lot of money, especially not split between two people and a business. Rent alone on most commercial properties is well over $1000 a month. If they couldn’t afford to professionally take a $16,000 hit, let alone personally as well, then they’ve been managing their finances extremely poorly. That’s $8000 per person, even assuming the business was completely bankrupt all along. The pictures they showed of the car prove they do decent work, and the engine mods means they know about the mechanical side of tuning. Why weren’t they taking other jobs to pay the bills? Fixing rust, bodywork, oil changes, engine repairs, and so on.

While this is a classic example of a scammer getting his just deserts, it also demonstrates that a solid business plan and good organizational skills are needed to run your own company. The shop owners clearly had all of their eggs in one basket, dreaming of a big “payday” and the potential advertising windfall if the car was successful in the show circuit. They should’ve tried taking on smaller jobs to pay the bills and tell this Joe guy that his car was going to take longer, or be more realistic about how far they could financially extend themselves. I would like to think that instead of just horrible planning, they had lofty ambitions of being the new “it shop” in the area, and wanted to prove that they could do anything and everything, and customer satisfaction was first priority.

I think this entire situation proves that eventually, karma’s a bitch, and if you keep screwing people over, you will get caught. It also demonstrates that small business ownership requires a rock solid financial plan, and business partners should never EVER take money out of their personal finances to run the business, as it often leads to disaster. Everyone, on all sides, can and should learn from this.