Towing companies arriving unannounced at the scene of an accident only to do some shady shit seems to be a recurring theme. It’s the perfect grift unfortunately and it’s happened again, this time to a big rig driver in the Windy City, as Chicago’s WGN9 reports.
On January 18, big rig driver Steven Yonan hit a viaduct in his semi and overturned the truck. Authorities, along with an ambulance, arrived on the scene of the accident. A tow truck also showed up, and Yonan couldn’t get any info out of them. “They said, ‘We don’t give a price. We don’t know how much it will be, you need to contact our dispatch,’” Yonan told WGN.
Now, over a week after the accident, the tow company, known as Emergency Towing & Recovery, is holding Yonan’s truck and charging him $41,000 to get it back. Worse yet, Yonan claims that, in documents shared with WGN, the company forged his signature on the invoice. All of this is made even worse by the fact that the company that towed the truck doesn’t seem to be a tow company at all, as a rep for Yonan’s trucking company explained to WGN.
“From what I understand they don’t even have tow trucks,” said Junior Smith of Cartage Experts, the company Yonan drives for. “They’re just guys who run around with police scanners, get on the scene, lock you down, then they start calling in people, like Official Towing was one of the trucks that showed up.”
The company engaged in some shady activity after towing the rig. The actual owner of the truck, a man named Ledmon Yousif, said that they drained over 150 gallons of diesel fuel from the truck and separated the trailer from the cab, something he says he has pictures of to prove. WGN tried to get information on Emergency Towing & Recovery as Yousif said they wouldn’t return his calls; a call the number was met with a “number disconnected” dial tone.
WGN went to their alleged address and found an unmarked impound lot that was gated and locked with no one around to question. Official Towing — the tow truck that actually arrived on the scene — was discovered to have been fined four times in the last three years for various violations. The plot thickened when it was discovered that Emergency Towing — which is listed on the invoice — hasn’t even existed long. The company was just registered with the office of Illinois’ Secretary of State at the beginning of the month.
Cartage Experts has now filed a complaint with the Illinois Commerce Commission hoping to get the truck back. But as a rep for the company pointed out to WGN, they’re on a tight timetable as the company wants to avoid getting charged any more fees. “Time is of the essence, that’s our biggest fear. Is that when we do resolve this they’re going to come back and say, ‘You owe us another $10,000 in storage fees.’ We just don’t know how it’s going to play out.”