America
Drivers Revolt Over Tow Truck Rackets
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Exorbitant fees, confiscation of vehicles spur national campaign for action. BY ALICE GIORDANO
redatory towing has become such a problem nationwide that it has set off a bipartisan effort to end
the practice. Lawmakers, motorists, and the
largest truck lobby in the U.S. are banding together to put an end to drivers facing outrageous fines or even losing their vehicles. From the blue state of Connecti-
cut to the red state of Mississippi, outrage over exorbitant involuntary towing fees has unified Democrats and Republicans on bills to curb the practice. New Hampshire state Reps. Ellen
Read, a Democrat, and Tom Man- nion, a Republican, sponsored a bill to repeal a law that allows police to suspend someone’s driver’s license if they owe money to a towing company, even though it’s a private debt.
“It’s complete extortion,” said
Read. Especially, she added, since the police were the ones to call the towing company in the first place. Most states have no cap or regula-
tion on what towing companies can charge. The payoff to towing companies is
huge — hundreds of dollars for just a 10-mile tow, plus a litany of other arbi- trary add-ons. A major contribution to the prob-
lem is a cozy relationship between towing companies and many police departments, who decide which busi- nesses get the call. In Florida, tow truck workers were
recently caught on home video cam- eras lurking late at night around cars parked in private driveways. If they found one with expired
plates, they hooked it up and towed it out of the owner’s driveway and then hit them with hefty bills to get their car back. The company told a
local TV station it was simply acting under a contract it had with the neighborhood’s home- owners association to enforce its parking poli- cies.
Some say outlandish
towing fees are also part of a scheme to seize cars and sell them for profit,
Fire Victims Targeted A
20 NEWSMAX | JUNE 2025
with towing companies in most states able to sell vehicles they hauled to their impound lots after just 30 days. In Connecticut, motorists only
have 15 days to claim their car until it becomes the property of the towing company. In Virginia, a newly enacted law
allows the state attorney general to fine a towing company found to be a “bad actor” 10 times the amount it charged a motorist and order the fine be paid to the victim. In Illinois, Democrat state Sen.
Celina Villanueva won Republican support with her proposal to turn the tables on unethical towing companies by impounding their tow trucks and suspending their plates. The American Trucking Associa-
tions (ATA), the commercial truck- ing industry’s largest lobby, says com- mercial truckers are also hit hard by unscrupulous towing tactics. Last year, it got the U.S. House Appropriations Committee to advance a bill that would require the U.S. Department of Transportation to oversee the towing industry. But just weeks before Donald
Trump assumed office, the Towing and Recovery Association of America (TRAA) successfully pressured the Biden administration to nix the move. According to a recently released
report by the American Transporta- tion Research Institute (ATRI), 82% of commercial truckers have been hit with dubious fees by heavy-duty tow- ing companies. The fees, ATRI found, included
excessive charges for the tow itself along with unjustified truck seizures and cargo release delays, which often led to the loss of entire shipments of food supplies.
cash for the return of their cars. One Eaton man, who barely escaped the fires with his life, was
t the height of the evacuations and chaos during the January wildfires in Southern California, a Los Angeles
County towing company trolled neighborhoods in the middle of the night and randomly hauled cars to impound lots. It then contacted owners and demanded huge amounts of
told he would have to pay $3,000 in fees to get his car back. As of April, some residents were still trying to recover their
cars, according to Kathryn Barger, chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, whose ofice is investigating the towing scam. — A.G.
JEFFREY GREENBERG/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES
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