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Lender sues Boston, tow company and RMV for the way a seized car it was still owed payments on was sold off
By adamg on Tue, 07/16/2024 - 9:37am
An Illinois lender yesterday sued the city of Boston, a Charlestown towing company and the Registry of Motor Vehicles over the way Boston lets tow companies not just seize cars on the order of Boston Police but sell them off without giving lenders the chance to get the car back first, which it charges is a violation of several of its constitutional rights.
In its lawsuit, filed in US District Court in Boston, Santander said this violated its due process rights and that Boston should have stopped the practice several years ago, after a federal judge in Boston ruled against Revere and ordered the city to reimburse a lender for the Honda it let a tow company take away and then sell for violating the lender's due-process rights.
Santander included RMV Registrar Colleen Olgivie because the registry approves the title transfers required for the tow companies to sell off the vehicles.
In the Santander case, the lender was still owed payments on a 2017 Acadia that Boston Police ordered seized in November, 2021, which Santander says gave it a "first priority" lien on the vehicle. The lawsuit does not say why the vehicle was seized, but police typically order vehicles taken in both criminal cases and for serious parking infractions, such as blocking hydrants.
Santander alleges that Boston has an agreement with Cityside Enterprises and other tow companies under which the companies take full responsibility for seized vehicles - which lets them begin charging storage payments and, eventually selling off the vehicle completely, which it said happened in the case of the Acadia - leaving Santander with nothing.
Santander charges that, in addition to not applying for a warrant to seize the Acadia, police never notified the company of the seizure. It said the first it heard of problems with the loan was when it got a letter on Dec. 15, 2021 from the city that the vehicle had been seized and that Santander had to pay $1,745,33 to CitySide to get it back.
Santander said it immediately demanded CitySide release the car to it, but that CitySide eventually responded it was keeping the SUV unless Santander forked over storage and interest, which had ballooned to $5,845.33. Santander said it refused to pay and CitySide sold the SUV - and kept all the proceeds.
At no time was Santander afforded notice, a hearing, or just compensation for Boston's deprivation of Santander's right in its collateral. ...
There is no law which requires Santander to pay Boston's towing and storage bill for Cityside's alleged services, or to comply with the other conditions placed by Defendants on the release of the Vehicle.
The Vehicle was not "abandoned," as Cityside's letters claimed, under any definition of the word.
The company continued that even if the seizure and sale complied with state laws, which it insists it did not, the practice is illegal, as shown in the Revere case.
As the [federal court in Massachusetts] had already held prior to Boston and Cityside's actions as to the Vehicle, the sale of a seized vehicle by a municipal towing contractor without any form or constitutionally adequate notice or any opportunity for a hearing for a lienholder prior to the sale of an unclaimed vehicle is unconstitutional.
Santander is seeking the return of the SUV, along with damages and attorney's fees, as well as an order requiring Boston, Cityside and the RMV to knock it off.
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 Complete complaint | 876.59 KB |
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Comments
I do not like agreeing with
I do not like agreeing with large corporations and insurance companies but they have a point. They own the car and it is not all that difficult to get a hold of them quickly if needed.
Finally
Towing and impounding has always been overseen by local cities and towns, whose police departments then oversee towing and impounding done by individual towing companies. That made sense 75 years ago, before computers. But it's a mess. Someone tows your car, you find it missing, and end up making multiple phone calls to track it down. The whole process needs be centralized by the state so that everyone who needs it can have visibility into it.
Not the same as Revere
From this story, it sounds like Santander was informed the car was towed but they refused to pay the tow and storage fee. In the case of Revere, the lender wasn't even told.
Why did Santander think they were exempt from the tow and storage fees? Had they paid the fee and taken the car initially, they could have sold it themselves.
Am I missing something?
The fees seem exorbitant and
The fees seem exorbitant and almost designed to extract the maximum amount of cash out of the bank. Initially the tow itself cost around $1,100. But then later City side towing was asking for a total of $5,400 for "storage fee's and interest" which seems like a lot of money for doing nothing but letting a vehicle sit in an industrial parking lot.
Why the city of Boston doesn't just pay the tow company the cash for the work done and avoid all this is beyond me. Instead the towing company does the tow "for free" and expects to recoup the money from auctioning off the towed vehicles.
The problems are 1) the state
The problems are 1) the state caps towing and storage fees. But then city then allows towing companies to charge that maximum fee when they authorize tows. The city could easily negotiate lower fees with towing companies, but they don't. They allow towing companies to charge the cap, which is unreasonable. 2) vehicle owners and lienholders don't get automatically notified when their cars get towed. The contact information data is sitting there in RMV and DOJ databases, but the state needs to marry it to towing information and notify the appropriate POCs.
Not enough money in that
And you can't give the lucrative contract to a politically connected company.
You have the facts right
This case exposes a lot of things that are bad. It's fine that the city sometimes has to tow cars. Does that mean that the tow companies can start charging usurious rates from the second the car hits the lot? How is this in the public interest? Clearly Santander was like, "You expect me to pay WHAT?" and the tow lot has no reason to be a good citizen, because if they just keep up their bad guy attitude they eventually get to sell the car and keep the money.
I hope Santander - whom I usually dislike - wins this case.
The towing company that the
The towing company that the property that I work uses charges just a little more than a 10th of what this Revere Towing Company is asking for its towing fee. I guess towing companies are free to charge whatever fee for towing they desire.
Nice work if you can get it
Offer to tow for the city without charging them anything on the basis that you get to keep the car and charge whatever you want to the car's owner. Or just sell the car and keep it.
These sorts of agreements should be illegal but I'm not optimistic anything will change. Politicians claim they are "saving" the public money meanwhile they most certainly are getting kickbacks from tow companies who want in on easy money.
https://www.mass.gov
https://www.mass.gov/involuntary-trespass-towing-rates-and-regulations says the maximum is $132 for towing and $35 per day for storage.
The storage part can add up to thousands of dollars if the owner didn't know the car got towed. I'm not sure why interest was charged in this case.
Especially because once the
Especially because once the tow company has it, they don't give a shit about any circumstances. I had a car stolen and abandoned halfway across town, where it was towed. By the time I found it, it cost me 700$ in cash to get it back, despite being the victim of a crime. Also the tow lot didn't say it was a cash-only fee until I got there - despite me CALLING and asking about the fee; they only accepted credit cards for DIFFERENT fees, apparently. So cue me shlepping through an extremely sketchy neighborhood to go get 700$ in cash and come back with it. Unsafe.
The tow lot also didn't tell me that the thieves had taken the key-ignition out, but did helpfully use a screwdriver they had to turn the car on, so I was stuck driving it home and then paying for a DIFFERENT tow truck to take it for repairs the next day.
Absolutely ridiculous. They're super shady businesses and it really detracts from living in this city that the government has essentially ceded the entire business to unaccountable jackasses.