Sunday, October 04, 2009
Metro columnist Dan Casey: Fight over high fees finds some justice
Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
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Cuc Cao didn't give up when the North Vietnamese Army overran her native country in the mid-1970s.
Or when Khmer Rouge guerillas halted her escape from Vietnam and threw her into a Cambodian concentration camp.
And the (now) 59-year-old Roanoke County resident didn't give up shortly after she and her husband arrived here in Roanoke, many years ago, when he died, leaving her with two toddlers and pregnant with their third child.
With that background, it's no wonder Cao refused to roll over when she believed a finance company overcharged her daughter on a car loan, or when a repo towing company forced Cao to pay $1,590 in "storage" fees to retrieve the car.
I detailed those outrages in a column about Cao in July. Today comes the happy news that she has achieved a small measure of justice.
Cao picked up a check for $412 from Hyundai Motor Finance on Wednesday at the office of her attorney, Marshall Mundy.
"I'm very happy," Cao told me.
"They really were taking advantage of this lady, I think," Mundy said.
Mundy says the owner of Larry's Towing of Floyd County, which repossessed the car, has told him they're willing to refund Cao $440 of the $1,590 in storage charges they levied charged her.
Larry's Towing owner Joyce Brown did not return a phone call about that.
A little background:
The $1,590 in storage fees were levied on a Hyundai Tiburon owned by Cao's daughter, Ngoc, 25.
Ngoc allowed the payments to lapse when she quit her job in the summer of 2008 and moved to North Carolina to care for a terminally ill uncle.
After his death, Ngoc moved to Hawaii and left the car with her mother. Hyundai repossessed it in November -- understandably, because the payments weren't current.
The problem was that Cao couldn't redeem the car, even after she'd borrowed the money. That's because she wasn't the legal owner. Her daughter in Hawaii was.
Cao had to get power of attorney from her daughter, and Hyundai hemmed and hawed over what they would and would not accept.
Partly because of that, 44 days elapsed between the day Larry's Towing repossessed the car and when Cao could retrieve it. They charged her $35 per day in storage.
Hyundai Motor Finance, meanwhile, charged Cao $412 more for the loan payoff than what the company's own documents indicated Ngoc owed in principal, interest, penalties and fees.
In a letter to Mundy, Hyundai said $350 of the $412 was the repossession fee, but that they were refunding the entire disputed amount "considering the circumstances and in the effort to make all parties involved feel equitable about the account transaction." There was not an easy-to-understand explanation for the rest of the overcharge.
There are a few lessons for all of us here.
One is, don't default on money you owe. Despite the red tape that followed, which increased the daily storage fees, Hyundai's repo of Ngoc's car was legitimate.
Another is, demand answers when you think you're being taken advantage of.
That's what Mundy did when he realized that Hyundai had charged Cao the extra $412. And again when he heard about the "storage" bill from Larry's Towing.
A third is, never give up. That's been a hallmark of Cao's incredibly challenging life as a refugee, a mom and a widow in a land where she still has great difficulty with the language.
Finally, there is this: At one time or another, we all feel like a "little guy" caught in a cold, unfeeling system that's taking advantage of us.
But every now and then that little guy wins one.
And when that happens, all of us should cheer.
