“Beantown AutoMobile Detailing” vandalizes my car, refuses to clean it up

On Wednesday night, April 16, 2014, after our minivan sat idle for two days while we celebrated the beginning of the holiday of Passover, I went out to run an errand and found a sodden, disintegrating advertisement from “Beantown AutoMobile [sic] Detailing” stuck between the driver’s side window and its lower rubber gasket. When I removed the ad, it unfortunately left a good chunk of itself behind, steadfastly stuck to the window:

It had rained during the holiday, and the rain dissolved the ad, and then the rain dried, and what you see above was the result.

Shortly after I took the photo above, the ad disintegrated to the point where it could no longer be read, so I threw it away. But the following photo, taken from the inside the minivan during the day, clearly shows the name of the company that left the ad:

Furthermore, conveniently enough, Beantown AutoMobile Detailing posted a photo of this very ad on their Facebook page:

In short, there is no question that this ad came from them.

I posted a complaint on their Facebook page later that night, asking if they would come clean off the mess they’d left on my minivan. That seems like a perfectly reasonable request to make of an automobile detailing company that messes up your automobile, don’t you think? They ignored me. They also deleted my posting from their wall at some point between April 23 and April 27.

Since they did not respond to my posting on their wall, I sent them a private message via Facebook on April 23, asking them, once again, to come clean the mess off my window. Here is how they responded the next morning:

I am sorry to hear this. Unfortunately, I have knowledge of my company being in the Brighton area. I will suggest that you apply nail polish remover to any particles that are left on your window.

Thanks,

B.A.D

This is what I wrote back to them:

Somebody stuck your flyers on every car on my block, and you’re claiming that some stranger must have done it and you had nothing to do with it?
Really? Seriously?
Let me put it a different way: You have 24 hours from now to own up to defacing my car and agreeing to come clean off the gunk you left on my window, or I’m going to call my local police station and file a criminal complaint against you for defacing my property.

They did not respond.

Therefore, today I visited the police station and filed a criminal complaint against Beantown AutoMobile Detailing for vandalizing my minivan (click for larger image):

I suppose they can expect to receive a phone call from a friendly BPD detective within a few days.

Oh, and I couldn’t help but notice, when I attempted to look up this business in the City of Boston’s DBA database, that they’re not registered. I’m sure they won’t mind paying the $300 per month fine, which they will presumably incur once I find the right city office to which to report the fact that they are doing business without a permit. [UPDATE: A helpful soul on Facebook found them registered in the DBA database under a slightly different name than the one under which they’re actually doing business. The fact that they have used three different names in two months — “Beantown AutoMobile Detailing”, “Beantown Automobile Detailing”, and “Beantown Auto Mobile Detailing” — does not bode well for their attention to detail.]

This is what happens when your business damages someone and you lie rather than owning up and fixing it.