Are My Expectations High or is This Poor Craftsmanship?

If the guy is a real low life you will be out not only your court fees, but also the $ you paid for the slipshod workmanship.

 

Have you taken any action against this guy yet. Stop waiting and do something. That type of work needs to be punished.

If your not going to sue at least light a bag of dog doo on fire and ring his doorbell.

 

Collection can be difficult, the court will give you a judgment and a writ, but it won't enforce it. I work enforcement of court orders, holler at me if you need some suggestions on how to enforce it.

 

He’s got $500 in silicone on those lights... bummer dude!

 

I very well may. I am pretty certain he won't pay willingly. I'm also a bit concerned that he hides behind an LLC, but I'm pretty sure he comingles his funds.. As I understand it, if you share a bank account with your LLC the courts won't distinguish between the two, right?

I appreciate your offer of help. I very well may reach out to you over the next few days. Up to now I've been asking Uncle Google.

$1427 and change + 2.87% interest.

He did not show, it was a default judgment, but I still had to give my account of events for the court records. I had over two months worth of text messages and the judge strongly inferred that the defendant knew his work was poor and that's why he didn't show.

I had the headlights and a lot of other evidence with me. I was actually disappointed that I didn't get to present it all.

The defendant contacted me today and told me that he can file with his insurance now that there is a judgment.

I am not expected to give his lights back but I will. The judge made clear that he awards money, and does not instruct either party to exchange property. I found this pretty interesting.

Tomorrow I have to file a notification of judgment with the defendant and the court to get the collections ball rolling.

 

Awesome, that’s great you got taken care of by the court. I am buying stock in Silicone now!

 

That gets tricky. If it's a LLC or corporation, it may not have his name on it. If he's a sole propreitorship, then it wouldn't matter. I have been serving court orders for 27 years. I own a business that does nothing but that. There are ways to hammer him. I think it said you are in Utah, I don't know the way Utah runs it but they are usually pretty similar to all other states, just a different code section, i.e. in CA it's the Code of Civil Procedure, here in Oregon it's under ORS Oregon Revised Statues. I can definitely point you in the right direction. Send me a phone number in the direct messages here and I'll help you out pro bono.

 

I concur, all he has to do is file bankruptcy tomorrow, and open the business up under another name. I would have called the credit card company and told them what happened, then filed a dispute for charge, but that’s me. Good luck...I see a silicone shortage happening soon.

 

It does have his name on it and it's also registered to his home address.

I will send you a PM tomorrow - very cool of you to offer your help!

 

Not that simple. No one is going to file Chapter 7 over a $1500 debt. An attorney will charge $1500 plus the filing fee. Not to mention the 10 year hit it will put on his credit reports. Also if he has assets, those can be liquidated to satisfy any outstanding debts during the trustee hearing. We are getting way ahead of ourselves here though. You can't wage garnish a self employd person being they don't typically receive W-2 wages, they are more profit/loss or a 10-99 class earner. If you know where they bank at, you can hit the bank with a levy. If you don't know where they bank, there are 3rd parties you can levy against too depending on the circumstances. If you want to spend the money, if nothing else than for the principle of it, if the judgment debtor owns his house, you can hit it with a real property levy and have the sheriff initiate a lien sale of his property. That usually wakes up the judgment debtor really quick. It just depends what you are willing to do about it. I"ll look up Utah law in the morning and see if I can direct our fellow Tundra owner in the right direction. I can't stand people who screw overs others. I am personally dealing with that right now with a contractor who screwed up a remodel job badly and even got caught stealing from me. So I feel like a kindred spirit to Backslider.

 

I maybe shouldn't have done this as it might have backfired, but because I was already resigned to chasing this guy down to get my money back, I began posting in the various local car and truck groups that I am a part of. I posted in FB as well in a number of classifieds, offroad, and vehicle buy/sell/trade groups. Doing it this way allowed me to link to HID Retrofit, LLC's business page on FB.

I had a number of responses from people saying that they were considering going with this company but would not be doing so now that they heard my account and saw the pictures of my headlights. Interestingly, last night Brian from HID Retrofit TEXTS me (this guy is afraid of the phone apparently) and tells me that if I can send him a notice of judgment, which I have to do anyway, he can now file a claim with his insurance and hopefully get it covered this way. This route would satisfy the entire judgment amount + any accrued interest. I don't mind waiting a few weeks for his insurance to respond.

I am also investigating whether or not it's legal and/or prudent to initiate a chargeback with my credit card company. My assumption is that this is not the right course of action as the instances under which a chargeback is justified are clearly laid out by my credit card company and this doesn't seem to fit any of those categories. Going this route would not recover the cost of the headlights themselves, or court fees. This is not an ideal option as I feel that if I did initiate a successful chargeback it would then be incredibly difficult for me to recover court filing fees, service fees, and the original cost of the headlights themselves.

I will post status updates here as things progress in case anyone is interested. I am also waiting for some other complete waste of skin to go through sentencing on Nov 14th so I can recover the firearm he stole out of my garage/truck... Not sure why the universe is dragging me through the dirt so much this year!

Here are some more pics depicting some of the scratches, cracks, liberal silicone application, and poor paint on these headlights.

 

@eledobleu

Now people on my local groups are wondering who to go to so I'm referring you. I haven't had any work done by you, but have seen plenty enough here that I feel confident recommending you.

Hope some business comes your way as a result of this whole mess. Mine certainly will be once I find a good set of headlights to send to you!

 

There's enough silicone that was used in that "project" to supply the Kardashians for a lifetime.

 

I wonder if those are salvageable? If you don't give them back to the a-hole, it would be fun to try to revive them. PM me if you are interested in giving them another life.

 

Yeah so.. If his insurance pays it out I'm probably going to keep them. I would give them back so he could recover some of his costs if he was paying out of pocket, but he's clearly not too keen on that idea..

I was thinking the same. The headlights are lost but all of the parts should be in good working order after some clean up. I might see what I can do myself if this happens.

 

I agree with you to a good extent. However, it really depends on how his business was set up, which determines how he will be effected personally. If it’s an LLC, I can’t see how his personal assets would be relevant to his business, therefore remain protected. Different states have different laws around this though, so I will pass this on and say I hope it’s not the case for this guy and wish him luck with collection.........

 

There are ways....

 

Now that I have a judgment I have filed a chargeback with my bank. This will satisfy $1052 of the over $1400 owed.

He is allegedly also filing a claim with his insurance company and may end up paying me the full amount. We'll see.

 

Claim should have been filed long before it went to a court scenario. It may be a honest comment on his part, but in my experience, when a claim is filed, they respond within 24 hours and you mentioned that a long time ago. Pursue it until you don't have to anymore.

 

Is it now ok to do the charge back since you have a judgement against him? Im just trying to understand the legalities. As I know before you said you couldn't do the charge back

 

Sorry, no.. you aren't supposed to file a charge back if you received the goods. My bank and others are very clear on this point.

 

Just read this from start to finish and holy shit what a soap opera. I honestly have no positive feedback but wanted to let ya know that this was a great read lol. Hope all works out.

 

Bank just returned funds (and debited his business) for $1052. Now to get the remaining $400 back.

 

Yeah, judge awards a judgment then it's on you to collect.