Pregnant woman finds car held by mechanic

Kristina, who is 38 weeks pregnant, and her husband fell victim to an unscrupulous auto mechanic. After a long search, the couple finally managed to find their car, which the mechanic had kept for several months.

“We took the car at night: he left it unlocked on the street, right with the keys inside,” Kristina told E1.RU. “Now we are waiting for the money to be returned. He is not making contact, keeps promising to call back, but ignores us.”

The woman also pointed to the poor quality of the repairs: “He only pulled out the pillar, and even that not completely, while the rest is purely a semblance of work. He did about 15–20% of what was agreed. And even the work that was done is terrible, and we are now being asked to pay extra to redo his work.”

The story began on 7 May, when Kristina’s husband was involved in a road accident. Since the car was the family’s main source of income, they decided not to delay the repairs. Acquaintances recommended a mechanic named Vladimir, who promised to get the car back on the road in just a week.

Instead of the agreed 80,000 rubles ($990 at current rates), 208,000 rubles ($2,600 at current rates) were transferred to Vladimir for the car repairs, and the work dragged on for months.

“He started asking for more and more money. First he needed to pay for the garage because he had recently moved. Then he needed to pay for electricity, saying he couldn’t work without light. Then he had run out of some materials and asked us to send money for paint,” Kristina explained.

From 5 June, the contractor stopped communicating. To repeated demands to return the car, he responded with promises to do so “tomorrow.”

“At some point we simply drove to the garage ourselves because we wanted to see our car. By then we hadn’t seen it for a month and a half. And, of course, we had the feeling that something might have happened to the car. When we arrived at the garage, no one showed it to us; he didn’t even come. On top of that, I managed to talk to some men who work relatively nearby. They said we were not the first people looking for their car,” Kristina said.

The couple is filing a police report against Vladimir, demanding a refund for the poor-quality services.

Earlier, we reported how a young Yekaterinburg resident took out a loan and sold an apartment on the instructions of scammers, and also published three phrases after which scammers will hang up and never call again. Also read about which fraud victims are entitled to compensation from the bank and in which cases.

Read more about how scammers also trick residents of the Urals in a special section.