When you are a victim of extortion....

What happened to me the night of Feb 8th of this year still has me in shock.

I'm basically on my last long trip in this truck. I was issued this truck in Oct of 19 and have fought to be left in it because I don't like the Macks or plasticadias which is all my company has as they getting rid of all Internationals. My truck is sitting on the yard getting the omnitracs installed and I was told it would be ready very soon.

So I'm going west and just got unloaded in Las Vegas. I get reloaded a few miles away in LV and head for a town near LA. I'm going down a long steep grade on I-15 and the engine's jakes are doing a good job of holding me and then all of a sudden the engine loses power.....then dies. I crank it back up and now it has almost no power. It eventually dies again. I restart it and limp it to an exit. It has a small gas station and nothing else. I'm 146 miles from LV and 164 from LA and I'm absolutely in the middle of NOWHERE.

I get out and with the engine running can see fuel coming out of the fuel pump. I tell my company and she calls for a repair truck to come out. 5 hours later in the complete darkness a service truck shows up. The guy proceeds to change the fuel pump and the engine cranks right back up, no leaks, running great. The temp is now dropping into the 20s. He said he would be sticking around until he can confirm payment then he'll leave. I told him that's fine, but I'm going to bed as I have to get up at 4am. I take my dog out real quick, climb in the bed and close my eyes.

I'm awakened by someone knocking on my door.

I was scared to even show my face because I was in the middle of nowhere and had no idea who the hell this would be. I was able to peek through a small gap between the curtain and the side of the door and could see the service truck was still there. I opened my window and asked him what was going on. He said your company is refusing to pay us. I told him to hang tight, I'll call my company. I call them and ask what's going on. She tells me that she's pissed how much they charged us, but that she tried with EFS and the company credit card and his online payment thing declined both. She said we don't have any other options in the middle of the night. He'll have to wait until morning to get paid. I tell him that and he goes back to his truck. He comes back a minute later saying that if we don't pay him immediately he will remove the part from my truck and leave AND PROCEEDS TO OPEN MY HOOD AND PUT A GLADHAND LOCK ON MY AIRLINE. Now I'm getting really pissed.

I call my company back and they said they didn't know what to do, I told them if this guy tries to disable my truck I will call the police as me and my dog's only source of heat and electricity is that engine. They tried calling the company back and telling him I wouldn't leave until they got paid and they said no good. The entire time THEY WERE CHARGING US 175 DOLLARS AN HOUR FOR HIS GUY TO SIT IN HIS TRUCK AND WAIT FOR PAYMENT!!!! Now this went on for 2 hours. Our original bill has now gone up 400 dollars without our consent and they say if you don't pay in full immediately the part will be removed.

At this point I'm pretty sure this is "tampering with a commercial vehicle" and "extortion" and is illegal. I told him if he touches this truck again I would be down there physically stopping him and calling the state police. I eventually used my own personal credit card and that worked, and we were charged 3500 dollars for this 1.5 hour job, 400 more than we agreed to. We were extorted by a company that threatened to disable my truck (when I told him I wasn't shutting the engine off he said I'll disconnect the ECM, I'll shut it off) if we didn't pay the increased amount.

I give the guy a negative google review and he calls my company and tells them that I better take my negative feedback down. He has 13 feedbacks, 6 or 7 are all one star reviews. My company told him basically to get bent and then he said "He better take it down if he knows what's good for him."

So now this has been escalated. If he wants to play this game, I'll have a lot of fun.

100 miles down the road, exactly, going down ANOTHER steep grade, the engine completely dies and fuel is pouring out of the engine from the same area. Turns out one of the fuel lines connected to that fuel pump exploded. Not just split, exploded. So I then sat all day at a chicken coup (when the engine quit there was a chicken coup at the bottom of the hill so I just coasted in) and wound up in a hotel room that night as the fuel line is on national backorder and we had to wait for a 2nd company to tow the truck to their shop and go have a fuel line made that would fit and get me back east to my shop.

Talk about horrible luck. But that guy telling me he was going to disable my truck in the middle of the night in the middle of the desert because we couldn't get any payment method to work has my company PISSED.