Dealership Remotely Disables A Car Over A $200 Fee (www.cbc.ca) 420
An anonymous reader quotes the CBC:
A car dealership in Sherbrooke, Quebec, may have broken the law when it used a GPS device to disable the car of a client who was refusing to pay an extra $200 fee, say consumer advocates consulted by CBC News. Bury, Quebec resident Daniel Lallier signed a four-year lease for a Kia Forte LX back in May from Kia Sherbrooke. Two months later, the 20-year-old's grandmother offered to buy the car outright when he lost his job and couldn't make his weekly payments. After settling the balance and paying a $300 penalty, Lallier said, the dealership told him he would have to pay an additional $200 to remove a GPS tracker that had been installed on the car...
Lallier said there was no mention of the removal fee in the contract and he disputed having to pay it."I just find it absurd that over $13,000 was spent on this vehicle and we still have to pay $200 more to have their device removed," he told CBC. After Lallier refused to pay the fee, a mechanic notified him by text message that his car was being remotely disabled until the dealership recovered the device and $200 fee. "I went outside and tested my car, and it wouldn't work at all...and I got angry," Lallier said.
Lallier had finally started a new job and was headed to work, according to the CBC. The president of the Automobile Protection Association says the dealership's action was clearly illegal, since once the balance is paid off, "it's not your car anymore."
Lallier said there was no mention of the removal fee in the contract and he disputed having to pay it."I just find it absurd that over $13,000 was spent on this vehicle and we still have to pay $200 more to have their device removed," he told CBC. After Lallier refused to pay the fee, a mechanic notified him by text message that his car was being remotely disabled until the dealership recovered the device and $200 fee. "I went outside and tested my car, and it wouldn't work at all...and I got angry," Lallier said.
Lallier had finally started a new job and was headed to work, according to the CBC. The president of the Automobile Protection Association says the dealership's action was clearly illegal, since once the balance is paid off, "it's not your car anymore."
Capitalist model will fix it (Score:2, Insightful)
A new business model: We'll remove that pesky fucker for only 100 bucks!
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Over here in Europe, we pity the people in socialist countries for being deprived of information and forced to live in ignorance. But we mock you for having information available but instead choose to live in ignorance.
Not being able to learn is miserable. Not wanting to learn is despicable.
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We also mock you for the atrocious health care you have because you can't afford to access it.
Wait until you can't make the monthly repayments on your wifi-enabled pacemaker...
Re: Socialist model - it started disabled (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, because people in the US choose to have a trade policy that favors outsourcing jobs. Oh, wait, most are opposed to that. We even elected a President over it and yet the politicians STILL fight doing something about it. Or how people in the US choose to not have full time jobs that have benefits. Oh, wait, most newly created jobs are part time low wage positions that don't come with anything. Yeah, people totally choose to be like that.
Maybe, just maybe, the problem with health care is that we have private, for profit companies running it when health care itself does not obey the laws of the free market. Here's a few: nobody is forced to buy or sell (bullshit when you have a broken arm, or cancer, or something like that). Second, everyone has access to perfect or at least good information. Also bullshit. Need I go on?
The dream that the free market can fix something that so obviously doesn't follow its principles is what's stopping American healthcare from being fixed. The primary problem with Obamacare is that it left for-profit primary health insurers in business. We don't have a health care problem in the US. We have a health INSURANCE problem in the US. The problem isn't as the Sarah Palin crowd likes to say, the government getting between you and your doctor (though the war on pain treatment is a good example they'll never bring up)--the problem is that fatcats in business suits get between you and your doctor, or between you and any doctor. Doctors don't like it, patients don't like it, and it's bad for the economy.
What? Bad for the economy? How? Ever wonder why large corporations, which would stand to benefit financially from not having to provide health insurance as part of job benefits, are so opposed to actually fixing this problem? Why would a company be like that other than political stubbornness on the part of its leaders? The answer is control. Many people are stuck in jobs they hate just so they can have health insurance. If we didn't tie insurance to employment, these people would be a lot more free to leave. People who are free to leave are free to work elsewhere, to start businesses on their own, to employ others themselves if they do, and generally increase competition both in the product market and for employees. None of that suits the ultimate goal of large megacorps, which is to have a servile immobile low-wage workforce with no competition in the market. Think about that the next time you want to lay blame for all this at the feet of regular working people.
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Oh, you're talking about the toilet paper our judges dubbed "the funny pages". Yeah, please bring this with you when you sue me.
Outrageous (Score:5, Interesting)
If you leave your property within an item you transfer to someone else, you should pay, not be paid, to recover said item. The dealership should be sued for extortion.
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If you leave your property within an item you transfer to someone else, you should pay, not be paid, to recover said item.
I find it more outrageous that the car can be disabled remotely.
This use-case was at most moderately malicious compared to what else can be done with such control.
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I think the word you mean is PROSECUTED, actually?
Sue them (Score:5, Interesting)
He should sue them:
As this is Slashdot, I feel obliged to say my first action would be to find that device and attempt to remove it myself. I would keep that box as a trophy.
Re:Sue them (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, accessing a device which is not your property (anymore) remotely, and using it with malicious intent. A.K.A. hacking.
Connected with extortion (like ransomware, "pay us, and we withdraw our actions.").
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oohooohooh --- now you can use unlawful access of a computer against them!
(only half joking; if the article is true, the dealership should be sued to the fullest extent of the law, including damages for things like emotional distress, lost wages, impact on career, etc.)
Re: Sue them (Score:3)
The dealership intentionally put the device in the car. If they wanted it back, they should have spelled that out at the time of sale. It's not like accidentally leading an unrelated piece of property in the car when you sell the car.
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No, but using your property to electronically attack and disable my property breaks computer misuse laws.
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No, your phone doesn't become mine, but (at least in my country) I can charge you for storing the phone until you come and pick it up at your expense.
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And $200 extra, a fee for removing said phone from the car? Refusing to just take your phone, and using it to disable my car unless I pay you to remove that phone?
Ownership of the tracking device is arguable, but moot, because whether it was the car owner's property, accessed illegally with malicious intent, or whether it was the dealership's p
File a criminal complaint first (Score:3)
His first action should be to file a criminal complaint for fraud and whatever they can make stick like some sort of "reckless endangerment" charge if he was on the road when it happened. "I'll see you in court" should start with the criminal and then go into the civil here if at all possible.
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No no not fraud, it's hacking they illegally accessed his device.
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Also since the GPS tracker was installed into the vehicle and the vehicle transferred ownership and then the stealership accessed it without authorization he should press charges for unauthorized access to a computer system (actually many counts; add up all the impacted computerized circuits in the path of the ECU, ignition module, CAN bus network, OBD network, and the GPS tracker/immobilization unit itself) plus wire fraud. Those will have some serious teeth. :-D
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Call them 1 888 258-7467 (Score:4, Informative)
Their toll free phone number is 1-888-258-7467
Time for an "inquiry" into their practices. If enough /. members call it will definitely cost them more than the $200.00 they did this for...
http://www.kiasherbrooke.com/fr/contactez-nous
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I'd recommend pausing the witchhunt. The dealership is saying it wasn't them. From a google review:
We assume you are leaving a negative review because of the recent news coverage concerning Mr. . It would be important to understand that the CBC has unfortunately mis-identified Kia Sherbrooke as the seller. The car was in fact sold by a third party. If, indeed you are leaving your review because of this subject, we ask you to please remove your review as Kia Sherbrooke is not implicated in the sale. We simply share the same adresse as the third party. We are sorry for the confusion this has caused.
We are currently in contact with CBC to clarify the situation.
Re:Call them 1 888 258-7467 (Score:5, Insightful)
Kia Sherbrooke is not implicated in the sale. We simply share the same adresse as the third party
Let me guess, the car was leased and disabled by "Kia Sherbrooke Separate Leasing Entity Not The Dealership LLC".
Re:Call them 1 888 258-7467 (Score:4, Insightful)
They aren't sham operations just because they do this. It's a legitimate business practice with legitimate purposes (that also happens to be abused from time to time).
That said, it also means it's 100% legitimate to focus your ire on the face of the business (the dealership), even if it was the finance company or lease company that pulled these shenanigans, because they are probably all owned by the same people. Even if they aren't owned by the same people, they are so tightly integrated that they essentially function as one business, and hurting one hurts the other, so the intended target still gets the intended message with very little lost in translation.
Sigh (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, according to the documents I have on my new car, once I have paid at least 50% of the balance, it's mine and they can't take it from me. If they want to recover from there, they can only pursue me as per a normal debt.
After 50%, it literally states that it's legally my property. Sure, if I refuse to pay, they know I should have a car, but they can't just repossess it immediately. Before 50%, if I refused to make payments, they could disable it, recover it, just walk up to it with a manufacturer's key and take it - it's still theirs.
And it counts the deposit and the finance, so you actually own the car earlier than halfway through the payment term.
Now, it's a bog-standard personal car purchase, so I imagine that that's pretty standard for the UK/EU or that it's a statutory ruling that they have to abide by and tell you.
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"Actually, according to the documents I have on my new car, once I have paid at least 50% of the balance, it's mine and they can't take it from me. If they want to recover from there, they can only pursue me as per a normal debt."
That's weird. In the US, you own the car immediately but the entity who loaned you the money has a lien on the car. If you get behind on payments the lien might make it possible for them to repossess the car and sell it to help pay off the loan.
The main function of the lien is to
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In Sweden, it's your car even if you paid 0% of the balance. If the car is the collateral, you cannot sell it and you are required to keep a certain level of insurance on the car. If you don't own it, it's considered a lease.
I'm skeptical. Do you mean to say that you actually have the title to the vehicle? If so, how are you prevented from selling it? Is there some system for establishing and tracking liens on vehicles? That seems like it would be complicated and error-prone... real estate is normally handled that way, but that's why we have to have title insurance and all of the complications it entails.
I suspect that it's more like the way it works in the US. When you buy (not lease) a monthly car with a payment, what you'r
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We have something we call a "court". You can take people there who violate contracts. It's pretty neat, no need to do anything yourself, to repossess the car or install tracking devices, all you do is go there and sue.
Yeah, we kinda outsourced vigilante justice to something we call "government".
Asinine behavior (Score:5, Informative)
Asinine behavior like this is what inspires people to write up how to's for removing these things. Turns out a fair number of these how to's already exist.
http://www.instructables.com/i... [instructables.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://trackimo.com/disable-g... [trackimo.com]
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So maybe pay someone to do it for you?
Kia Sherbrooke Facebook (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Kia Sherbrooke Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)
If they share the same address, the "3rd party" is probably just another division of the same company.
Re: Kia Sherbrooke Facebook (Score:4, Informative)
It is. A quick look through the Quebec enterprises registry (I won't bother linking to it, it's exclusively in French) shows they both are owned by the same parent company...
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We share the address but it's not our fault.
That's a new one. Also, how does a dealership get involved with a third party deal like that? The article even said it was one of their techs who notified the new owner. Something ain't right here.
Clearly lying their ass off (Score:2)
I looked at their address on Google Earth - 4339 Boul Bourque, Sherbrooke, QC J1N 1S4, Canada
There is NO other entity at that address. It's fully and wholly a Kia Dealership lot, both from satellite and street views. The only thing even CLOSE is an alignment shop, across the street, but that one seems to only do alignments for large vehicles (semi trailers, judging by what I could see inside the open bay doors.)
The dealership, like most car dealerships on the planet, are lying their asses off.
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I'm currently looking at their Google Streetview and I'm having a hard time accepting their explanation. If it's not them, who is the third party? Their finance company? If they were really that innocent, why don't they share the name of that third party sharing that address with them?
dealerships are scum with there hidden / BS fees (Score:2)
dealerships are scum with there hidden / BS fees.
Hell some even did shit like after the sale called and said we forgot to add this fee or we sold the car for to low of an price and if you don't pay up we will void the sale with the car being marked as stolen
Did The Dealership *Own* It When It Was Disabled? (Score:2)
Instead [here in the UK] the client typically either enters into a hire-purchase type of agreement with the vendor of the vehicle [which in this case would be Kia Canada, Inc], or they enter into a quite separate leasing contract with a third party leasing company. Then what happens is the leasing company pays the dealership the ticket price of the car [som
Owner should push the issue (Score:2)
Owner should find a really successful attorney and push to have the stealership prosecuted for unauthorized access to a computer and for wire fraud; both of those have some serious teeth and could land the mechanic in prison indefinitely.
Pacta sunt servanda (Score:2)
The extortion/blackmail isn't even the main point, if it wasn't mentioned in the contract, he bought the device with the car, just as he bought the water pump and battery and he should get the data and software needed to operate it himself if the car ever gets stolen.
Double standard (Score:2)
So that article makes the point:
>> the dealership's action was clearly illegal, since once the balance is paid off, "it's not your car anymore."
Yet no-one seems to care that GM and Tesla are building exactly the same tech into their cars in a very non-optional way. You literally can't buy any Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick, or GMC without Onstar already installed.
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You've confused GPS signals with GPS tracking devices. You're right that a GPS signal is not going to disable the vehicle, but GPS tracking devices often include the necessary cellular network hardware to provide remote disable capability.
So, yes, you can disable a car via the GPS tracking device.
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[..]GPS tracking devices often include the necessary cellular network hardware to provide remote disable capability.
So, yes, you can disable a car via the GPS tracking device.
...correct, but No the car was not disabled via a GPS signal. The parent was correct (albeit a bit patronizing) in pointing this out.
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Cellular network hardware isn't going to allow for disabling either.
What you really have is probably three devices integrated into a single package
A GPS receiver
An automotive immobilization device
And a cellular communication device to allow remote tracking and activation of the immobilizer.
If a tracking device allowed for immobilization, then a lot of geese, whales, etc. could be in for a rude surprise...
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Yes. They would have used cellular communication for that. The disablers are commonly referred to as GPS devices since they provide GPS tracking info (also via cellular) to the dealer. It's just a short name for the thing, not a mis-understanding of the technology involved.
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Which would be fine, except that "GPS device" already has a well-defined meaning, and that's not it.
Now, you could argue that it's a "term of art" within the car-leasing business, and that's fine. But it's still shame on CBC for not clarifying the term when presenting it for public consumption.
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Does the immobilizer have builtin GPS? If so, then calling it a "GPS device" is correct, and the company die use this GPS device to disable the car.
Yes, the term "immobilizer" may be more precise. But that does not make "GPS device" incorrect.
You could shove one in soft fruit and claim it was immobilized by bananas. Its inaccurate and misleading to refer to features of the device that had nothing to do with how it was used to immobilize the car.
Asp-hole (Score:4, Funny)
That's like saying you can kill an elephant with a rolled up newspaper if you tape the newspaper to a rifle.
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"...and why the elephant was carrying a rolled up newspaper I'll never know."
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I can't believe you guys are arguing over the semantics of this.
You know this is /. right? Semantics are important, you have to choose the right shapes to get your point across.
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Re:GPS can only send location (and time) informati (Score:5, Interesting)
Fucking brilliant plan. You fall behind on payments and they remove your ability to move around and have a hope of making the money. I bet they charge you for the privilege too.
Of course. And repo the car and sell/lease it again to someone else they hope can't keep up with the payments so they can do it again. And again... John Oliver did a good piece on the practice. IIRC one car had been sold 80+ times... A search for something like 'John Oliver car loans' on Youtube will probably find it.
Re:GPS can only send location (and time) informati (Score:5, Insightful)
But he didn't agree. That's kind of the point. Also, once you sell a vehicle to someone else, it should be your responsibility to recover any items you may have left in it at the time of transfer. Trying to force the buyer into paying to return property he didn't even know he had is repulsive. The dealership should be sued into insolvency just for trying.
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If a person owes you a bill, you bill him. Or file a mechanic's lein. Or sue him.
Breaking his stuff is not on your list of legal options. Because it is _his_ stuff. You have damaged his chattel and deprived him of the use of it. Doesn't matter if you had owned it at some time in the past.
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You can't take back weld-work. The only thing you can do is more weld-work in the same place.
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You sure can take back welds! ;) [northerntool.com]
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But he didn't agree. That's kind of the point. Also, once you sell a vehicle to someone else, it should be your responsibility to recover any items you may have left in it at the time of transfer. Trying to force the buyer into paying to return property he didn't even know he had is repulsive. The dealership should be sued into insolvency just for trying.
This is why you never buy from a dealer.
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Re:GPS can only send location (and time) informati (Score:4, Interesting)
That's just it they keeping lowering the entry credit scores to increase sales. Home sales are down to 1% down payments to increase sales of homes. The problem is with normal life debt the average salary of $50k a year isn't enough to purchase the average home price of $200k. So the banks and realtors are doing tricks to keep their sales up. Again. Except this generation has so much college debt in order to get a salaryabove $50k a year that they can't buy a home until they are 40 under the smart 20% down payment.
The same reason is why trade jobs are struggling. Trade jobs basically top out at 50-60k a year and that is just barely above poverty level in major cities and lower middle class elsewhere. We need a huge salary bump. Not a minimum wage bump but a median wage bump. That is something that hasn't happened in 40 years. And it is starting to drag the economy down.
I RTFA (Score:5, Interesting)
I know, I will turn in my card later...
The fee wasn't in the docs. The dealership asked for it after they sold the vehicle to him. The guy's mother (is he a Slashdot reader?) settled it with the dealership. The dealership removed the device at no additional cost.
I am guessing they forgot to remove their property and saw that the subcontractor (many times the service behind the hardware is someone else) would charge them ~$200 so they decided the pass on the charge. At this point, tough luck, deal was done. The user doesn't even need to return the GPS (service can be turned off), it kind of was sold with the car. The dealership should have asked nicely and gone to pick up their stuff.
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The alternative for the dealer would have been sending this to collections, so this guy could have been harassed for some indefinite period of time. I am really not sure that is better but it was prior practice.
The alternative is not selling a car to someone who can't afford it for way more than it's worth so you can repossess it down the line, sell it again to someone else in the same boat and keep collecting the payments.
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Really check your frigging outrage. This is market working!
This is all irrelevant. This happenned in Québec, and in Québec, we have the rule of law, and our law is far more reaching than US law, because we do not have common law, but the civil code, which is not precedent-driven (so the richest cannot purchase “justice”). And according to our civil code, what the dealership did was illegal, plain and simple.
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"Surprising someone with additional fees at checkout time is a shitty business practice"
And you can refuse to pay.
Surprising someone with additional fees AFTER they've paid and actively preventing them from taking or using what they've already paid for is extortion.
Re: GPS can only send location (and time) informat (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything installed by the dealer attached to the car that requires tools to remove at the time of sale is conveyed with the car. One can make the argument that they illegally accessed his immobilizer system.
It doesn't even matter whether or not he could access or use the immobilizer, it was part of the car they sold to him, therefore it's his.
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Unauthorized hacking. What's that, 20 years in prison? Oh wait, those laws only apply to plebes.
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while it may be embarrassing, so is not paying the Bills you agreed to pay.
He had not agreed to pay.
Re:GPS can only send location (and time) informati (Score:5, Insightful)
You missed several points. The biggest one is ownership. Until you pay the car off, the dealership is the actual owner, so it is perfectly legal to disable THEIR car whenever they like. In this case, all agreed that the car was paid off. That means the dealership was illegally disabling someone else's car.
Next up, the first mention of the devices existence was when the dealer demanded a $200 fee to remove it. Nobody had agreed to anything about it at that point.
Re:GPS can only send location (and time) informati (Score:5, Insightful)
You missed several points. The biggest one is ownership. Until you pay the car off, the dealership is the actual owner
That is not how it works at all! At least not in the US and I doubt it works that way anywhere else in the world. When you purchase a car, even if the manufacturer loans you the money, the car is yours. You do not own it free and clear. There is a lien against it, and that can be used to repossess the car, but it is yours until such time that you default on the loan and a court with proper jurisdiction authorizes the repossession of the vehicle. Now in this case, the vehicle was a lease and they may have additional rights prior to the purchase of the leased vehicle due to the fact that the dealership or manufacturer does own the vehicle in this case.
However, once they transferred ownership to him, with the GPS tracker installed, HE became the owner of the GPS tracker. The law is pretty clear that anything that is permanently mounted to the vehicle (as in you couldn't just detach it and walk away with it immediately) is the property of the new owner. So if it really is so integrated into the car that it takes $200 worth of labor to remove it, the tracker is his. Perhaps the dealership ought to have removed their property prior to handing the vehicle's ownership over to him.
Re:GPS can only send location (and time) informati (Score:4, Informative)
Time to learn to read. I'll help you:
"Bury, Quebec resident Daniel Lallier signed a four-year lease"
When you lease a car, you don't own it. It's owned by a third party and you lease it from them. A lease is a rental agreement with a specified time period.
Oh silly me. I must have forgot how to read. Thank god I accidentally covered myself when I said:
Now in this case, the vehicle was a lease and they may have additional rights prior to the purchase of the leased vehicle due to the fact that the dealership or manufacturer does own the vehicle in this case.
They later bought the car.
At which time they became owner of the vehicle and all objects permanently attached to it. Like I said in my last post.
The device was likely on the car to facilitate remotely disabling the car if they got behind on lease payments, and should have been mentioned in the leasing contract. Since they were no longer bound by that contract due to the ownership change, they have no right to remotely disable the car. If the dealership has a smart lawyer they're already mowing the guy's yard, sucking him off, and asking how many 0's he'd like on the settlement check.
You're right, they have no right to disable the car. And it doesn't matter why it was on the car, only that they no longer own the vehicle or the tracking device. If they were in the US, I would certainly report this to law enforcement as an unauthorized use of a computer system as they clearly used a computer at some point to unlawfully disable the device.
You don't understand the law at all (Score:2)
You missed several points. The biggest one is ownership. Until you pay the car off, the dealership is the actual owner, so it is perfectly legal to disable THEIR car whenever they like.
I can only speak specifically to in the USA, but I'm sure it would be the same in Canada. You simply can't disable a car someone is driving whenever you like. Your statement implies that the dealership could do this for any reason at all including the amusement of the people at the dealership. It's not hard to imagine a scenario where the car is disabled in the middle of a high speed road or highway or intersection and a fatality results. That certainly would involve liability issues for the dealership
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It just disables the starter, so it's not going to cause a problem on the highway.
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Read my comment again, with comprehension this time. What part of "Nobody had agreed to anything about it at that point." did you not understand?
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I agree with you that there need to be further legal restrictions so people don't get stranded and particularly don't get endangered.
I was speaking to existing law which was also violated in this case since it was no longer the dealer's car.
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There is a Car Lot in my town where if you miss a payment, they disable the vehicle. This sort of thing isn't new and while it may be embarrassing, so is not paying the Bills you agreed to pay.
Would you be as sanguine if it happened to you? Did you miss the line in TFS that said, "Lallier said there was no mention of the removal fee in the contract and he disputed having to pay it."? Or are you just being smug and self righteous in the Internet?
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Not reading the article is completely normal, but replying not even having read the summary, now that's embarrassing.
Re: GPS can only send location (and time) informat (Score:2)
Governments usually come down pretty hard on any (unshielded) terrestrial transmitters on GPS frequencies. The only transmitters are supposed to be in orbit. That's why this car wouldn't have a GPS transmitter.
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But according to Forrester you can disable anything via GPS, and cause it to explode too.
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The land of the little guy who means nothing anymore, and the coroprations/comanies that can stomp on people unable to legally defend themselves in many, many instances.
Assuming you mean North America since Quebec is located in Canada...
Re:Only in America (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Only in America (Score:5, Funny)
CA = Califoria.
C Eh = Canada.
Sorry.
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I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or you're actually that stupid.
Re: Only in America (Score:2)
Your post is my favorite post of the day. It was beautiful.
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The land of the little guy who means nothing anymore, and the coroprations/comanies that can stomp on people unable to legally defend themselves in many, many instances.
Wow! When did we invade Quebec?
Re: Only in America (Score:2)
1836.
Not that it matters, but we've invaded Canada a few times. Most recently, we had military action in 1990 in Canada. Yup... We sent armed forces, offensively, to Canada in 1990. I believe Canada apologized. It was over a golf course, First Nations people, and the death of a police officer.
They, though I guess they were not officially Canada at the time, set fire to our White House. This was largely ineffective and entirely unnecessary. In their defense, we had burnt their capital down prior to that. Tha
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No, you can't send other messages over GPS. There is no exploit, and GPS is completely irrelevant to this story.
Presumably there is a cell modem in the car, which was used to remotely trigger the immobilizer.
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Once he have has bought out the lease, how difficult would it be for the owner to remove the disabler himself, or just smash the modem?
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My guess is pretty difficult. You may not be able to even find the thing very easily.
At the very least I'd imagine that smashing the cell modem would trigger the immobilizer.
Re:Outrage? (Score:5, Insightful)
These things are often installed with the knowledge of the user of the car, as a way to disable the vehicle if they skip town with it or stop making payments on it, and so it's installed with a similar level of covertness as is a lowjack or a car alarm. Not to say they're all "installed properly", but the idea is to put them in some nonstandard location, made to look like they belong, not in a location easily discovered by accident or even if you're looking for it, and almost always wired up in such a way that simply cutting it out will render the car disabled by default. You have to know how to "restore the connections to the engine/computer/starter after cutting the unit out, otherwise the car's computer, ECU, or starter won't work because some of its lines (that were bypassed during the installation of the device) were not reconnected in their normal/default way.
As an example, on my new truck, the aftermarket remote start/alarm I had installed has "memorized" my chipped key and that's the only reason it can remote-start start the truck. (since the key isn't present) If you cut out the alarm, you will have interrupted the lines between the computer and the ignition switch, and the car won't start for you because it can't see the key.
Any alarm/disabler that ceases to disable the vehicle when simply cut out is junk. They do exist. I've owned one in the past that installed a relay in series with the starter solenoid power, and was connected by default. Only when the relay received power would it disable the starter. The relay was turned on when the alarm was going off. So in that case if you cut out the alarm (or simply unplugged the connector block from the unit, if you could find it) then the kill relay would have no power and the vehicle would start just fine. That's a bad design though. Reminds me of the movie trope where there's a bomb or something that's attached to a timer and the good guys are trying to disarm it but run out of time before they can figure it out. So they just reach in and rip it out, and that disables the bomb. (Rei ripping out the compressor, Carol Marcus disarming the torpedo by ripping out the fuser, etc) Or any number of movies where shooting the security panel at the door unlocks/opens the door, or shutting down the power to the building unlocks the vault door. Despite what you've seen in the movies, that's not how they're supposed to work. This is the difference between something that's designed to 'fail-safe" vs "fail-open".
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Plus the consent of the owner.
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As with all things accounting, the devil lies in the details. I guarantee that in their accounting system, there is a "waterfall" logic applied to any payments - where fees and taxes are paid first, interest second, and principal last. When he paid the payoff of the lease, it paid the $300 early buy out fee, any taxes, this stupid, allegedly undisclosed, and unbelievably unethical $200 fee, and left $200 of principal on the account.
In any legal proceeding, I guarantee this is what the stealership will cla
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Re:Auto protection assoc is wrong (Score:4, Informative)
This was a lease. If it's a lease, it's still the dealer's car. Hence the whole reason the GPS was installed in the first place. It stops being the dealer's car once the dealer is paid in full. The naughty part is that the dealer probably didn't tell him about the tracker and the removal fee. The client should be informed, and the removal fee should be built into the lease price.
Wrong.
Canada is a Common Law country like most of the commonwealth. In fact their legal system closely aligns with the UK and most of the commonwealth.
If the vehicle is under a lease, the leasee is the legal owner responsible for insuring and taxing the vehicle. The vehicle is security for the leasor. If the lease falls into arrears, there steps permitted to be taken are spelled out clearly in law (and the lease agreement). The leasor is only permitted to take legal possession of the vehicle after it has been made clear to a court that the terms of the lease have been breached, I've got a leased car in the UK, the V5 and Registration is in my name, as is the contract with BMW Finance. A lease is not a rental contract, which is what you're thinking of.
Disabling the vehicle remotely is completely illegal and a violation of consumer rights.
However that is pointless because the vehicle in question was not under finance. The owner had paid off the finance, including the penalty and the dealer was trying to impose a C$200 extra charge for removing a GPS tracker. So the vehicle was completely under the ownership of the former leasee which gives them absolutely no legal cause to remotely disable the vehicle. This is extortion by the dealer, pure and simple.
Yes, I read the article.
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Yes, I read the article.
And me without mod points. Kudos!
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Some part of "buy the car outright" giving you trouble?
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Tell that to the President.