Servicing a customer’s car doesn’t somehow give the service provider permission to do anything with it, though that seems to be what one California mechanic thought. That being said, Reddit user Newtothebusiness2020 has accused their mechanic of taking their car for a joyride while being held in the shop for a transmission repair. Upon checking the dashcam after their vehicle was serviced, OP noticed multiple files had been deleted, a very suspicious discovery.
Little did the mechanic know that the deleted data from the dashcam could be recovered easily. According to Newtothebusiness2020 in their r/legaladvice post, “These people are clearly not smart if they think just deleting it off my dashcam would be a done deal.” After browsing through the files, OP claims they discovered proof that someone who wasn’t the mechanic had been driving their car. If that wasn’t damning evidence, the odometer had also increased significantly despite the vehicle not having been driven in a month.
It goes without saying that hundreds of Redditors were appalled that the auto shop workers thought they could get away with this. “They really thought just deleting files from SD card was enough, like it’s 2005 and nobody knows about recovery software. That alone shows they know what they did is wrong,” remarked a user. “File a police report. That is theft,” suggested another commenter.
On Top of the Deleted Dashcam Data, The Car Was Allegedly Dirty
If all this wasn’t bad enough, the car was allegedly a mess. “When I went to pick up my car, it was filthy,” Newtothebusiness2020 recalled, explaining how a “dog had walked all over the back and the front and the other seats.” When confronted, the boss of the auto shop was apologetic and sent OP $200 to detail the car’s interior. However, the car owner was anything but satisfied.
Newtothebusiness2020 calls out the auto shop for being “incredibly dishonest for initially trying to hide their wrongdoing by deleting the dashcam footage. “But they weren’t smart enough to permanently delete it, nor did they know how to stop the GPS tracking,” they wrote. OP now plans to send the California business a demand letter for the full cost of complete detailing and compensation for mileage and lost use. If they disagree or ignore, it might be time for a small claims court.
