In a nutshell, Honda Village lied to us when we bought our car, lied to us after the fact, ignored our complaints, sent us (and others) intentionally misleading junk mail and refused to stop when asked, sent us lots of spam and refused to stop when asked, and did mediocre auto-body work for us which took multiple attempts to get right (this last point was Village Collision, another business within the Village Automotive Group umbrella of which Honda Village is a part).

Nevertheless, Honda Village is where we bought our Honda Odyssey minivan, and they are the closest Honda dealership to our house, so when we need service done that is warranty- or recall-related and/or inexpensive and hard enough for them to screw up, we take our van there. Or so I thought.

A number of months ago, I brought our van to Honda Village for some simple service or recall or something; I forget the details. After looking up our van in the computer, the associate informed me that I had to speak to the service department manager about something. I went into the manager’s office, where he informed me that Honda Village would not service my vehicle.

Honda Village has never apologized for any of the things I complained to them about. They have never acknowledged doing anything wrong, unless you consider it an “apology” when they paid me the refund I demanded for the warranty which they convinced me to purchase by outright lying to me about its coverage (fraud!).

Their response to my legitimate complaints was not to acknowledge them and try to improve. No, their response has been to continue on with business as usual and refuse to serve me.

Judge for yourself whether this is a business which deserves your patronage.

P.S. I just realized that I never got around to posting what happened after my last letter to Honda Village’s lawyer. So, for those who are curious… Their lawyer sent back a response asserting that the precedents on which I was relying were out-of-date, and citing a newer precedent which he claimed precluded my filing a Chapter 93a claim against Honda Village. After reviewing that newer precedent, I thought he was probably right, and in any case didn’t have any more time to waste on it, so I dropped it.

November 17, 2009

American Honda Motor Company, Incorporated
Honda Automobile Customer Service
Fax: (310) 783-3023

To whom it may concern:

I sent you the attached letter via fax on November 17. You did not give me the courtesy of a reply, but at least the spam directed at my wife’s email address seems to have stopped.

Unfortunately, now Honda Village is spamming MY email address, jik@kamens.brookline.ma.us, instead of my wife’s.

Honda Village obtained my email address when I sent them a message through their Web site on October 15, 2009. Here is the exact content of that message:

(Do not add my email address to any bulk email lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my email address only so that you can respond to this request. NO OTHER USE OF MY EMAIL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)

(Do not add my postal mailing address to any direct-marketing lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my postal address only so that you can remove me from your direct-marketing list as described below. NO OTHER USE OF MY POSTAL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)

For months now, you have been sending me junk mail in envelopes that you have intentionally designed to deceive recipients. You’ve made them look like some sort of official certified or registered mail, and you’ve intentionally left your company name and return address off of the envelopes. These envelopes are clearly designed to get people to open them, when they would just throw them in the trash if it was obvious they were from you.

This kind of deceptive direct-mail advertising is exceedingly slimy. It is distressing to me that I purchased a vehicle from a company that employs such slimy tactics. You have proven to me, unfortunately not for the first time, that my initial impression, that you were different from all the other slimy car dealers out there, was wrong.

Whatever mailing list I am on to be sent these slimy mailings — please get me off of it. Right now. And leave me off of it. Permanently.

As you can see, I clearly and unequivocally told Honda Village NOT TO PUT ME ON ANY SPAM LISTS, and yet that is exactly what they have done. Here’s what has transpired since then:

• October 17, 2009 – I received a “Did you get my info” form sales email from Alex Stoyanov, which I ignored since it was obviously irrelevant to what I had written to Honda Village about.
• October 18, 2009 – I received a “The best use of your time” form sales email from Alex Stoyanov, which I (again) ignored since was (again) obviously irrelevant to what I had written to Honda Village about.
• January 3, 2010 – I received a “Your Honda Service Reminder” email from honda@reminder.honda.com, i.e., the same spam that you had previously been sending to my wife’s address as outlined in my previous letter. I immediately unsubscribed by clicking on the link in the email.
• January 4, 2010 – I received a “Valuable Honda Service Offers” email from homda@reminder.honda.com. When I clicked on the link to unsubscribe, it informed me that I was already unsubscribed! Isn’t it remarkable that Honda can continue to send me email messages from which I’ve supposedly already unsubscribed?
• February 22, 2010 – I received another “Valuable Honda Service Offers” email. Once again, when I clicked on the link to unsubscribe, it informed me that I already was.

In short, Honda Village started spamming me when I clearly and unequivocally told them not to, and they are continuing to spam me over a month and a half after I told their automated system to unsubscribe me and their system confirmed that I was, in fact, unsubscribed.

All of this spamming my wife and me against our will is a direct violation of the federal CAN-SPAM Act.

You forced me to waste an hour of my time writing my last letter to get you to stop spamming my wife, and now you’ve forced me to waste another hour of my time writing this letter to get you to stop spamming me.

To be blunt, what is WRONG with you people?!

MAKE THE SPAM STOP. NOW. AND MAKE SURE IT NEVER STARTS UP AGAIN. EVER.

CC: E. Peter Mullane, Esq.

I received in the mail today a letter from E. Peter Mullane, the lawyer whom Village Automotive Group has apparently retained to respond to my Chapter 93a letter about their deceptive advertising practices.

It is worth noting that E. Peter Mullane’s chief claim to fame is that he is one of the lawyers who defended John J. Connolly Jr., the former FBI agent who was convicted in federal court of racketeering, obstruction of justice, murder and conspiracy to commit murder and will be spending the rest of his life in prison.  Nice!

I am not going to publish Mullane’s letter here, because there are all kinds of legal issues with that, and… well… Mullane is a lawyer, y’know?  I will, however, publish the response I just sent him, from which you can get a pretty good idea of the claims he made in his letter.  Enjoy!

E. Peter Mullane, Esq.
6 Bennett Street
Cambridge, MA 02138-5708

Dear Mr. Mullane,

I received your letter today concerning Village Automotive Group. Not Honda Village, because the deceptive practices about which I wrote are being used by multiple VAG dealerships, and because Honda Village is not a registered corporation but rather is part of Village Automotive Group, Inc. As such, any class action undertaken in response to these practices will name VAG as the defendant.

While agree with your characterization of the advertising industry as “primarily and unapologetically based upon the premises and goal of the advertisers trying to get people to buy things they perhaps do not really need, or to use products that have less value than is being represented and touted by the manufacturer,” the law views these objectives differently from intentional deception, i.e., knowingly misleading consumers into believing something that is completely and objectively false.

Concerning your example, “the pharmaceutical companies who spend billions of dollars advertising prescription drugs that commonly do not perform as advertised, and in fact in many cases have undisclosed side-effects that are actually harmful to the consumer,” in fact, drug companies are prohibited from knowingly making false claims and are required to disclose side effects. There have been several high-profile cases recently when drug companies have been fined and prosecuted for failures in this regard.

As for your other example, “companies advertising the social benefits of alcohol and tobacco use, while promoting the fiction and deception that the use of those products is the key to the road to happiness and having a fun time,” advertisements are permitted to employ exaggeration and hyperbole which a reasonable man would recognize as such, and the alcohol and tobacco advertisements to which you refer clearly fall into this category, and the law does not regard them as “deception.”

As for your assertion that the advertising industry is protected by the First Amendment, that is true to a large extent, but again, that protection does not apply to intentional, knowing deception. If that were not so, then the deceptive advertising elements of Chapter 93a would have been ruled unconstitutional long ago. For example, an oriental rug store may not repeatedly advertise fake “Going out of business!” sales to dupe customers into thinking that they are getting a good deal when they are not.

The envelopes which Village Automotive Group is using to mail its advertisements to consumers are designed to intentionally, knowingly deceive the recipients into thinking that their content is different and more important than it actually is. This is true for at least three different reasons:

1. The sender of the mailings is not identified on the outside of the envelopes.
2. The envelopes bear markings designed to make them falsely appear to be Certified Mail™, thus making the contents of the envelopes appear to be more important than they actually are.
3. The other markings on the envelopes, e.g., the printed year and the font used for the return address, are designed to mimic those of mailings sent by the federal government (most notably, the IRS and/or Social Security Administration), thus, once again, making it appear that the contents of the envelopes are far more personal and important than they actually are.

Unlike an alcohol or tobacco advertisement, a reasonable man would not recognize the deception being promulgated by one of these envelopes until he had already opened it. Indeed, the strategies employed by these envelopes are designed and intended to deceive a reasonable man.

According to Duclersaint v. Federal National Mortgage Association, 427 Mass. 809, 696 NE2d 536 (1998) “A practice may be deceptive if it reasonably could be found to have caused the plaintiff to act differently than he otherwise would have acted.” That is clearly the case here, as the entire purpose of these deceptive envelopes is to cause their recipients to open them rather than throwing them in the trash as they would have if they had recognized their real origin and purpose.

On the subject of damages, Chapter 93a does not limit itself to actual damages, but rather permits redress for incidental damages as well. Indeed, according to Leardi v. Brown, 394 Mass. 151 (1985). Chapter 93A can be used to redress any injury, defined as “invasion of a legally protected interest.” and “plaintiffs are entitled to nominal damages even where no actual damages are shown.”

For example, if a consumer sees a “Going out of business!” banner in the window of a rug store, enters the store thinking he is going to get a bargain on a rug, and discovers that in fact the rugs being sold are of poor quality and not worth even the supposedly “bargain” prices being asked for them, he may file a claim against the store under Chapter 93a even if he did not purchase a rug, citing as damages the lost of time spent determining that the store’s advertisement was deceptive.

I assert time damages resulting from lost time spent opening your client’s deceptive advertisements before realizing their deceptive nature, as well lost time spent attempting to get your client to stop sending me these advertisements. I further assert damages resulting from emotional distress: since purchasing a vehicle from your client, I have become disgusted by their deceptive and dishonest practices and intensely ashamed that I ever did business with them, and I am forced to relive these painful emotions every time I receive another advertisement from your client. I further assert damages from invasion of privacy resulting from your client’s failure to stop sending me the advertisements when I asked them to do so. By the way, thank you for confirming that your client received that request, thereby making it impossible claim that they did not, should this matter go to trial.

Even if you are correct that my request was passed on to a vendor who failed to act on it, that does not diminish your client’s liability. The vendor was acting as a paid agent of your client, and it was incumbent upon your client to ensure that the vendor had proper procedures in place to ensure that requests such as mine were properly handled. Furthermore, concerning the nature of the advertisements, your client obviously worked with the vendor to design them and is thus liable for the intentional deception. Nevertheless, you can be sure that if a class action is initiated against your client for employing these deceptive practices, the advertising vendor through which the mailings were sent will be named as an additional defendant.

I have now demonstrated that the actions of your client were both unlawful and injurious under Chapter 93a. I include here by reference, without modification, the demands I enumerated in my last letter. I look forward to your prompt reply.

January 22, 2010

Ray Ciccolo
Village Automotive Group
75 North Beacon Street
Allston, MA 02134-1912

Dear Mr. Ciccolo,

Once again, I find myself sending you a M.G.L. Chapter 93a letter because of Honda Village’s deceptive trade practices.

In June 2009, Honda Village started sending me promotional materials in envelopes that look like this:

[image elided; see my previous blog posting]

I am not going to waste my time explaining why this is clearly intended to deceive the recipient about the source, importance, and content of these mailings. I know this is so; you know this is so; the methods of deception and intent to deceive are obvious. I’m quite certain that a judge will agree.

I received a number of these mailings before I finally decided to ask you to stop sending them. On October 15, I sent a message through the contact form on your Web site which read as follows:

(Do not add my email address to any bulk email lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my email address only so that you can respond to this request. NO OTHER USE OF MY EMAIL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)

(Do not add my postal mailing address to any direct-marketing lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my postal address only so that you can remove me from your direct-marketing list as described below. NO OTHER USE OF MY POSTAL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)

For months now, you have been sending me junk mail in envelopes that you have intentionally designed to deceive recipients. You’ve made them look like some sort of official certified or registered mail, and you’ve intentionally left your company name and return address off of the envelopes. These envelopes are clearly designed to get people to open them, when they would just throw them in the trash if it was obvious they were from you.

This kind of deceptive direct-mail advertising is exceedingly slimy. It is distressing to me that I purchased a vehicle from a company that employs such slimy tactics. You have proven to me, unfortunately not for the first time, that my initial impression, that you were different from all the other slimy car dealers out there, was wrong.

Whatever mailing list I am on to be sent these slimy mailings — please get me off of it. Right now. And leave me off of it. Permanently.

Honda Village did not have the courtesy to reply. Furthermore, since I sent the message quoted above, I have received at least two more of these offensive mailings, the most recent one today.

If you had stopped sending these when I asked you to stop, I would have left it at that. But since you didn’t, I have decided to teach you a lesson not only about not sending junk mail to people who have asked you to stop, but also about engaging in deceptive trade practices.

Chapter 93a stipulates that individuals may sue businesses which engage in deceptive trade practices for the greater of actual damages or $25. The law further stipulates that double or even triple damages shall be awarded for willful violations and/or when the violator refuses to grant relief. Finally, the law stipulates that a claim for damages may be made by the plaintiff for each separate violation.

At first glance, $25, may not seem like a lot. However, I have documented at least four such mailings, which increases the damages to $100. Given that your attempt to deceive is clearly willful, and that you failed to grant relief by stopping the mailings when I asked you to, triple damages are warranted, i.e., $300. And of course there’s also the filing fee.

But wait, there’s more. Chapter 93a (Section 9) also has this to say:

(2) Any persons entitled to bring such action may, if the use or employment of the unfair or deceptive act or practice has caused similar injury to numerous other persons similarly situated and if the court finds in a preliminary hearing that he adequately and fairly represents such other persons, bring the action on behalf of himself and such other similarly injured and situated persons; the court shall require that notice of such action be given to unnamed petitioners in the most effective practicable manner.

In other words, I can and will argue, if you force me to take you to court, that every single recipient of these mailings is entitled to $25 in damages, tripled to $75, for every single one of the mailings they received. That will obviously bump the case out of Small Claims Court and into Superior Court. That’s fine with me, since I have no doubt that I’ll be able to find a class-action lawyer willing to take the case on contingency.

How much do you reckon it’ll cost you to defend against this lawsuit, even if by some miracle you are successful?

As required by Chapter 93a, here are my demands for an acceptable settlement to this matter:

1. You will pay me $200 (two hundred dollars), i.e., double the minimum damages to which I am entitled under Chapter 93a, as compensation for the time I’ve spent publicizing and trying to stop your deceptive practices. This is a fair compromise to save us both the trouble of going to court, where I would surely be awarded triple damages.
2. You will permanently cease and desist from sending promotional postal and electronic mailings of any sort to my wife or me.
3. You will agree in writing that any future promotional mailing sent by you to my wife or me will ipso facto cause us undue emotional distress, and that you will pay damages to us in the amount of $500 (five hundred dollars) for each such mailing.
4. While not admitting fault, you will agree in writing to permanently cease and desist from sending promotional mailings, to anyone (i.e., not merely to my wife and me), that are designed to deceive the recipient as to their contents. Furthermore, you will agree to always identify Honda Village or Village Automotive Group by name on the outside of all future promotional mailings.
5. You will agree in writing that any future promotional mailings from you which do not identify Honda Village or Village Automotive Group by name on the outside shall ipso facto constitute a deceptive trade practice under Chapter 93a.
6. You will agree in writing to allow me to publish your response to this letter, including but not limited to the commitments enumerated in the previous two paragraphs, on my blog.

As required by Chapter 93a, I will await your response for 30 days from the date of this letter before initiating legal action.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

November 17, 2009

American Honda Motor Company, Incorporated
Honda Automobile Customer Service
Fax: (310) 783-3023

To whom it may concern:

HONDA HAS BEEN SPAMMING US FOR TWO YEARS DESPITE OUR REPEATED REQUESTS FOR YOU TO STOP. This is completely unacceptable. You need to make it stop.

In mid-2007, we bought an Odyssey from Honda Village in Newton, MA. While shopping for it, my wife made the mistake of giving the dealer her email address ([elided]) on a pre-sales Web form. Since then, we’ve been spammed many times, despite repeated attempts to make it stop. Here’s a sampling:

• December 20, 2007: Spam from “honda@honda.messages1.com” with the subject “Let’s all go green this holiday season”. We clicked on the unsubscribe link, which started with http://links.mkt015.com/.
• February 7, 2008: Spam from “khunt@hondavillage.com” with the subject “Honda Village Pre-Pesidents [sic] Sale Event”. There were no unsubscribe instructions (a violation of the Federal CAN-SPAM act!). I emailed khunt@hondavillage.com the following:
  
  My wife asked you to stop spamming her after the last message you sent. You just sent her another message today. Please remove [elided] from any and all Honda Village databases and email lists immediately. Any further bulk email messages from you will be reported as spam to your network service providers.
  
  I received no response. Note that there was at least one spam message before this one, about which we also complained to khunt@hondavillage.com, for which I don’t have the exact date.
• August 12, 2008: Email from tony@hondavillage.com with the subject “A message from Village Automotive Group” thanking my wife for her recent visit to the service department. I responded, “Please remove my wife’s email address from your database and do not use it again.” I received no response.
• December 5, 2008: Email from tonys@hondavillage.com with the subject “Happy Holidays from Honda Village”. I clicked the “http://www.autoloop.us/” unsubscribe link at the bottom.
• March 26, 2009: Spam from “honda@honda.messages1.com” with the subject “Honda News – 2010 Honda Insight Now Available”. Again, I unsubscribed via the http://links.mkt015.com/ link.
• September 24, 2009: Spam from honda@reminder.honda.com with the subject “Valuable Honda Service Offers”. I unsubscribed using the http://dealercommpref.honda.com/ link.
• November 17, 2009: Spam from “honda@reminder.honda.com” with the subject “Valuable Honda Service Offers”. I didn’t even bother to click the unsubscribe link this time.

That’s at least eight different spamming incidents and seven different attempts to get the spam to stop.

I don’t want to hear any buck-passing. I don’t want you to tell me to contact the dealer to make them stop spamming me. I expect you to contact the dealer to make them stop spamming me.

Furthermore, I expect you to make Honda corporate stop spamming me as well. The two messages above from honda@honda.messages1.com both appear to have from Honda corporate, and the second one was sent over a year after I told Honda corporate to stop spamming us.

I suppose if Honda corporate thinks there’s nothing wrong with spamming customers, it’s understandable that one of your dealers things it’s OK too. The fish rots from the head.

While I’m taking the trouble to write to you, I will mention that this repeated spamming is not the only slimy practice in which Honda Village engages. When we bought our Odyssey, the salesman blatantly lied to us about the coverage of the “paint dent repair” warranty, then ignored my repeated complaints about the misrepresentation, then promised to refund most of the cost of the policy, then never sent the promised check. I had to send them a Massachusetts Chapter 93a letter threatening a lawsuit for triple damages to get them to refund my money. The full story is told on my blog at http://blog.kamens.brookline.ma.us/~jik/wordpress/hv1.

In addition to this, the Honda Village sales department has been sending junk mail that is specifically and carefully designed to hide the source of the mail and make gullible people think that it’s an important tax-related document, so that they will open it rather than throwing it away. This is so reprehensible and slimy that every time I think about it, I’m angry that I ever gave Honda Village a cent of my money. This story, too, is told in more detail on my blog, including photos of the offending envelopes, at http://blog.kamens.brookline.ma.us/~jik/wordpress/hv2.

Does Honda condone spamming, lying, and deceptive sales practices?

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

Since I first wrote about them in June, Honda Village has sent me many more pieces of junk mail enclosed in envelopes that do not have their name or return address on them and that have been intentionally designed to make the recipient think they are some sort of official business so that the recipient will open them rather than throwing them away.

As I wrote then, I consider this type of direct marketing to be exceedingly slimy.  I finally got annoyed enough about it today that I’ve sent Honda Village this message through their Web site.  We’ll see if they actually listen.

(Do not add my email address to any bulk email lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my email address only so that you can respond to this request. NO OTHER USE OF MY EMAIL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)

(Do not add my postal mailing address to any direct-marketing lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my postal address only so that you can remove me from your direct-marketing list as described below. NO OTHER USE OF MY POSTAL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)

For months now, you have been sending me junk mail in envelopes that you have intentionally designed to deceive recipients. You’ve made them look like some sort of official certified or registered mail, and you’ve intentionally left your company name and return address off of the envelopes. These envelopes are clearly designed to get people to open them, when they would just throw them in the trash if it was obvious they were from you.

This kind of deceptive direct-mail advertising is exceedingly slimy. It is distressing to me that I purchased a vehicle from a company that employs such slimy tactics. You have proven to me, unfortunately not for the first time, that my initial impression, that you were different from all the other slimy car dealers out there, was wrong.

Whatever mailing list I am on to be sent these slimy mailings — please get me off of it. Right now. And leave me off of it. Permanently.

Thank you.

Long-readers of my blog may remember the experience my wife and I had when we bought a minivan from Honda Village in Newton, MA. To summarize, the salesman from whom we bought our van outright lied to us about one of the warranties he convinced us to buy, then ignored my complaint letters about it, then promised a refund check which they never sent.  I had to threaten legal action to get them to refund the cost of that warranty as promised.

Well, I’m sorry to say that Honda Village is up to their slimy sales tactics again.  I got an envelope in the mail a few days ago which looked like this on the front (click for bigger image):

And this on the back:

Notice how cleverly this envelope is designed to look like something important; in fact, it’s pretty clearly designed to look like something from the IRS (the big bold “2009″ makes that clear).  Notice how cleverly the green registered mail “sticker” (except it’s not really a sticker — it’s actually a fake registered mail sticker printed on the envelope) on the front wraps around onto the back, as do the two black bars on the side.

Notice how nowhere on the envelope does it say who it’s from.

So, what do you think I found inside this incredibly urgent, “official use only” envelope when I opened it?  A letter from Honda Village telling me that if I trade in my 2007 Odyssey and buy a 2009 Odyssey, I can reduce my monthly payment by $232.64 per month.

Deceptive envelopes that force people to open junk mail are one of my big pet peeves (previous instances reported on my blog: Verizon, Verizon again; I’ve received others before that I haven’t blogged about).  I won’t do business with companies that use them.  So, although Honda Village was already in my hall of shame, now they’re doubly so.

My wife and I were pleased by the experience we had about six months ago buying a Honda Odyssey from Honda Village in Newton, MA. Certainly, Honda Village was a lot more pleasant than Herb Chambers Honda of Boston, the other dealership with which we dealt seriously. Herb Chambers tried to pull every single slimy car-dealer trick we’d never heard of, but Honda Village was slime-free.

Or so we thought. When we went to close the deal at Honda Village, out came the offers for the various extended warranties. Scott Adams has joked on his blog, not entirely in jest, that scientific studies prove that people’s resistance is low at this point in the car sales process, which is why it’s easy for the salesman to convince them to purchase all sorts of unnecessary warranties. That may be true, and for all I know the few add-ons we purchased are all worthless and stupid. However, the one in particular that I’m concerned about is the one about which the salesman outright lied to us.

The cover-up was worse than the crime. If they’d apologized for misleading us and responded to my complaint quickly, all (or at least most) would have been forgiven. However, as you’ll see from the letter I’ve reprinted below, that is not exactly what happened.

I received a check from Honda Village a week after I sent the letter below, over three months after I first complained to them. It took the threat of legal action (which I clearly would have won) to prompt concrete action. This is simply not acceptable.

On a related note, Village Collision, the collision repair arm of the Village Automotive Group of which Honda Village is a member, seems to be run by well-meaning people who are nevertheless not terribly good at their jobs. Two days after we bought our Odyssey, some idiot side-swiped my wife in Newton Corner by trying to go straight from a left-turn-only lane, thus ruining three body panels. We brought it to Village Collision for repair, and it took them three tries to get it right. We had to bring it back a second time because the bottoms of the replacement body panels were misaligned (and I mean obviously misaligned; this was simply shoddy workmanship) and then a third time because they forgot to plug back in one of the air bag sensors and left a fuse disabled. They were very nice about the whole thing, but is getting the job right the first time really too much to ask for?

I’m sorry to give a bad review to Honda Village or Village Collision, since they’ve been recommended to me by friends, and since for all I know they’re the best that’s out there. However, regardless of that, what happened to us is simply unacceptable.

And now, the final letter (which I sent via certified mail with a return receipt requested):

December 3, 2007

Ray Ciccolo
Village Automotive Group
75 North Beacon Street
Allston, MA  02134-1912

Dear Mr. Ciccolo,

I am sorry to have to write to you again, both because I really don’t wish to waste your time (even though your failure to deal with my complaint has wasted plenty of mine), and because the fact that I am writing to you again means that my problem still hasn’t been resolved.

To recap, here’s what happened before my October 30 letter to you:

1. Honda Village misrepresented the coverage of your “Paint Dent Repair Agreement” policy to my wife and me when we bought our Odyssey in June.
2. When I discovered this, I wrote to Bobby Levenson on August 21 and asked for a refund on that policy because of the misrepresentation.
3. Mr. Levenson didn’t respond, so on September 30, I wrote to Christine Caron.
4. Ms. Caron didn’t respond, so on October 30, I wrote to you.

Here’s what has happened since then:

Shortly after I wrote to you, I received a call from Mr. Levenson. He didn’t have my letter in front of him, was unware of the substance of my complaint, and wasted my time making me explain it again to him in detail. He failed to apologize or take responsibility for the fact that his salesman misled my wife and me. He failed to apologize or take responsibility for the fact that neither he nor Ms. Caron had responded to my previous letters. He said he couldn’t give me an answer immediately on the phone and would have to look into it and get back to me. He called me back later and said that although he couldn’t refund the entire price of the policy, since the dealership had paid for it, he would refund 75%. He said that a check would be mailed out that day.

What he was essentially telling me was that the dealership charges a 75% mark-up on this policy, which is simply outrageous. I imagine that the dealership charges a similar mark-up on the other add-on policies we bought, which means that even if he had charmingly offered to refund the entire price of the dent repair policy, the dealership still would have been left with a substantial net profit. Therefore, it was frankly astoundingly stupid for him to offer to refund only 75%, since by doing so he revealed to me your outrageous mark-up, something which I assume you are not in the habit of revealing to customers. This guy is your sales manager? Unbelievable.

Two additional important events have transpired (or not transpired, as the case me be) since my phone conversations with Mr. Levenson:

1. He never mailed the check, or at least I never received it, and somehow I doubt it was lost in the mail.
2. I spoke today with the company that issued the policy, IAS, and they informed me that the policy does not cover dents in our our vehicle’s bumpers.

Let me tell you why that latter point is extremely significant. When my wife and I were filling out the final paperwork for our van, and we were offered the option to purchase the dent repair policy, we had the following conversation with the salesman:

SALESMAN:	The policy covers dents smaller than a softball in the vertical sheet metal components your vehicle.
ME:	Does that include the bumpers?
SALESMAN:	Yes, absolutely.
ME:	Are you sure? I don’t think the bumpers are made out of sheet metal.
SALESMAN:	No, they definitely are.

My wife and I both remember this conversation quite clearly, and we will testify to that effect in court, if it comes to that

In other words, not only did your salesman mislead us by failing to inform us that no dents with damaged paint would be repaired, he also overtly lied to us by telling us in response to a specific question that something was covered by the policy which in fact is not.

If Mr. Levenson had bothered to send the check which he promised me over a month ago, I never would have called IAS and found this out, and that would have been the end of it.

However, now that you’ve wasted more of my time by making me write to you again about this problem, and now that I’ve discovered that the manner in which we were deceived about this policy goes way beyond misleading by omission and into the realm of overt lying, you can be sure that I’m no longer going to let you off that easy.

I expect you to refund every penny that we paid for this policy, plus the cost of postage, stationery and printing for all the letters I’ve sent about this matter ($6.94), plus $[elided] compensation for the hours I’ve wasted writing letters and talking on the phone trying to get this issue resolved. I expect to receive your check by overnight delivery to my office address ([elided]) within five business days of your receipt of this letter.

This letter constitutes a demand letter under Chapter 93a of the Massachusetts General Laws. If you do not satisfy my demands, my next course of action will be to file suit against Honda Village for the full price we paid for the policy, plus legal fees, plus the cost of all my letters, all tripled because Honda Village has engaged in unfair and deceptive trade practices in this matter, to whit:

1. lying to us about the coverage of the policy when we purchased it;
2. ignoring my letters of complaint; and
3. falsely claiming that a refund check would be issued.

If you do not believe that I have a rock-solid Chapter 93a case for triple damages, I suggest you speak with your lawyer immediately, because I assure you that if I sue, I will win, and I will win triple damages. The last company which ripped me off and ignored my attempts to settle the dispute ended up paying for it to the tune over $800 in punitive damages from a Chapter 93a decision in my favor. Don’t make the same mistake they did.

It’s such a shame that it has come to this. I had such high hopes that Honda Village would be different.

I look forward to the prompt resolution of this matter.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens