Sunday, July 19, 2009
Metro columnist Dan Casey: The $1,600 repo and other affronts
JOHN W. ADKISSON I The Roanoke Times
After Cuc Cao paid off her daughter's repossessed car, she had to pay the towing company an extra $1,590 to get it back.
Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
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Every now and then you hear a story about somebody who's been taken advantage of, and they don't deserve it at all. It almost makes your blood boil, you know?
That is the situation with a case we'll call "Cuc Cao, the Hyundai and the $1,600 repo job."
But before we get into that, let me tell you a little bit about Cuc Cao.
She's a tiny, soft-spoken, modest woman of 59 with graying hair and fair skin. She was born and raised in a large family in Vietnam.
She and her husband fled their homeland in 1981.
After more than two years in concentration and refugee camps in Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines, they emigrated to the United States and to Roanoke, where Cao's brother already lived.
That was in 1983. By then the couple had a young daughter. Within a year, Cao had a second daughter, and she was pregnant with her son when her husband died of cancer in 1984.
The young widow was nearly alone in a strange country, where she couldn't speak the language, raising three young children.
Somehow, she did it. The family lived on welfare and in public housing for many years.
Cao's daughters and son graduated from North Cross School, which they attended on scholarships. You can hear the pride in her tone when she talks about them.
The eldest, Lan, 27, holds a master's degree and works for the Department of Defense in Hawaii. Ngoc, the middle daughter, and son Long attended college as well but have not finished.
Cao, who now lives in a house in Southwest Roanoke County owned by her brother and eldest daughter, earned an associate's degree at Virginia Western Community College. This newspaper in 1994 honored her as one of six Roanoke Valley "Moms of the Year."
This surprising and extraordinary chronology emerged during getting-to-know-you pleasantries when we sat down in a coffee shop last week to discuss the $1,600 repo job.
Cao is not looking for anyone's pity. After she modestly recounts each life chapter of tragedy and triumph, she pauses, and says in soft, broken English: "But I'm lucky."
What she is looking for are some answers, because she can't understand the $1,600 repo job. Neither can her longtime friend attorney Marshall Mundy, who first relayed the story to me.
In the summer of 2005, Cao's younger daughter, Ngoc, was working at a local pharmacy when she purchased a new 2006 Hyundai Tiburon sedan, financed through Hyundai Motor Finance Co.
Ngoc kept up monthly payments until the summer of 2008. That was when Cao's brother in North Carolina became terminally ill. Ngoc moved there to help her aunt and uncle, and the car payments lapsed. Cao's brother died.
Hyundai Motor Finance Co. repossessed the car late in November. It was driven away by an outfit called Larry's Towing and Recovery in Floyd County.
By then, Ngoc had moved to Hawaii to be closer to her older sister. But Cao was determined to help her daughter avoid the scourge of a bad credit rating. So she contacted Hyundai and borrowed money from everybody she knew to raise the $13,645 payoff the company wanted.
But Hyundai Motor Finance Co. wouldn't immediately accept Cao's money. She had to get a power of attorney, which Cao says the company finally accepted on the third try. All of this took some time.
Cao finally sent a cashier's check for $13,645 by two-day mail on Dec. 24. But in the meantime, she'd gotten another statement from Hyundai that showed the payoff was $13,233, including interest and penalties.
Nobody at the company would explain why she had to pay $412 more.
Hyundai gave Cao the name and number of the towing company that had the car. When she called Larry's Towing, they directed her to a place off Virginia 8 between Floyd and Christiansburg.
"It was 'stored' outside in a field," Mundy says.
Cao also got a big unwelcome surprise. Larry's Towing demanded $1,590, cash only, to release the car.
What could Cao do? She paid it. But when she asked for an itemized receipt, they wouldn't provide one because it was after regular business hours. They said they'd send it to her, but they didn't. That was Jan. 9.
Then Mundy got involved.
He says Hyundai told him the $412 extra Cao paid was a "repossession fee."
Larry's Towing finally sent a receipt, which Cao says she received July 2. It shows they charged her $35 a day for 44 days for storage. Plus they charged Cao a $50 "redemption fee."
That is about the price of a month and a half's rent in a luxury two-bedroom apartment in Roanoke.
I wanted some answers from Larry's Towing and Hyundai Motor Finance Co., but I was mostly out of luck.
At Larry's, a woman named Christy who would not give me her last name said, "We've done everything we could for that lady."
Christy noted the company's owner, Larry, had been badly injured in an accident and was unavailable for comment. She promised to have Larry's attorneys call me. But she would not give me their names, and they didn't call.
Another woman at Larry's Towing named Morgan said: "It wasn't in a field. We have a secured lot."
Getting through to Hyundai was even trickier.
A representative at Hyundai Motor Finance Co. referred me to Hyundai Consumer Affairs. But a Hyundai Consumer Affairs case manager named Matt, who also would not give me his last name, referred me back to Hyundai Motor Finance Co. But, Matt noted, they wouldn't answer my questions anyway for privacy reasons -- even general ones.
I also e-mailed Hyundai's public relations department but got no response.
Ngoc is paying back her mother. Long is driving the Hyundai.
The storage fees seem high to me, but not to Robert Young, a Roanoke tower who's been in business 27 years. He charges $45 per day but does few repos. Young noted that, often, storage fees are paid to help cover costs on vehicles for which a tower never gets paid -- and that can easily be the majority.
Mundy says he's going to take the case to the Virginia Board of Towing Recovery Operators.
It's unclear if they can do anything. But the director, Marc Copeland, told me the board has been effective in the past at resolving such disputes.
Cao, meanwhile, does not seem at all angry about this. But she believes she's been overcharged, and she wants some answers.
She's not going to give up. When you sit down with her and listen to her life story, you realize that's not her style.
Stay tuned.
Dan Casey's column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.
