The Expert Podcast

Lots of good lessons from this story. If you are an owner of a classic car that you're restoring, or if you're a mechanic or…a restoration company, this is an excellent…article about an event that happened to end up costing somebody millions of dollars because of an improper restoration scheme And. And mechanic that was not doing the right thing. In this case there was a wealthy individual who used to own Angie's list which is a. kind of a contractor type. social media platform. And the former CEO I had a bunch of classic cars and he wanted to have them restored and properly. brought back to their regular self So what he did was he worked with a boutique mechanics somebody who did this type of work on these older cars. And had them work on vehicles and this mechanic also…helped him find some vehicles. Well over the course of a couple of years, he overcharged for service work on multiple rare vehicles. And he also faked some vehicles right This is something to watch out for If you are a classic car collector…Make sure that you're…checking the provenance of a vehicle Look, this is somebody who is a CEO of a major company He had millions of dollars. And he thought he was doing. proper due diligence on vehicles but what happened is…he. Was it was…promised that he was purchased. a very rare Austin Healey 100 M sports car. And he told it was a coveted factory model, but needed some assembly. We'll come to find out. It was not that type of, Original factory vehicle. he paid 50,000 for it, and it turns out that it was worth nothing. He discovered that the 100 M was not a factory 100 M as Hellinger the alleged mechanic had promised. Hellinger told bill the color. that it will cost 10,000 to assemble and sent bill an invoice for 130,000. But that wasn't even the worst one. Right. The worst one was where he. Purchase a vehicle for 16,000 It told the work would be. Done in one to two years and cost 200,000. Four years later the job wasn't completed but he had bills for a million dollars. So these are big numbers and you might use smaller numbers for your particular scenario. The important thing is if. are a collector and you're hiring somebody I make sure that they know what they're doing and they have…good track record in history. Also if you're a mechanic, make sure you're managing your restorations properly. So you don't get into a situation where you were prosecuted Look. This mechanic have to pay back $7.2 million. But that's what's called treble damages because in the state of Iowa where this happened, If you caused damages through fraud, you have to pay back three times what you took in. So this mechanic only took in $2.4 million for work over the period of time this happened, but he had to pay back 7.2 million. So he's filing bankruptcy He'll end up going to jail and there'll be other financial. downside So make sure that if you're a mechanic you're managing your fairs properly. If you're a restoration client that you get constant updates and if you see things spiraling out of control maybe consider pulling those vehicles back. And need to do it yourself or having another mechanic take over the job.