Should have reported the theft immediately, and that the car was stolen without either owner or HOA consent. When returning it the police would still arrest the tow company people, because despite returning the vehicle they had either taken without consent, or had damaged the vehicle in the tow.

Chances are all you would need to do is report the theft to a police, sheriff's, or highway patrol. If he has a contract with any of them, he'd lose it. There by losing his bread and butter. Predatory towing gives the rest of us a bad name. We hate them too, but have to pretend to like them. We still have to deal with them regularly.

Tow truck owners that have their operators do this are just greedy and have no scruples. Bottom line is that they know most people don't know what they are doing is illegal or just don't want to be bothered with calling the police and the time it takes to get the situation ratified. So they just pay the towing fees and retrieve their vehicle which is what the owner wants and how they get away with it.

And charge them for kidnapping and/or keeping someone from leaving a place they have every right to leave. And they should have to sell the tow truck and give that cash to the person who owned the car. This must be enforced to the letter and in 99.9999% of situations. I bet this sort of abuse would practically disappear overnight.

@@TOWTWUKERimho the good ones like you need to demand very harsh treatment for the criminals who commit towing fraud. This driver and the owner of the truck and company should be fined, to pay the locality and the truck should be sold with proceeds going to the illegally towed party. Then the driver and owner need to be legally prevented from working in the industry. If it’s a “family business” so what? In the same way that good cops are doing the wrong thing when they don’t stand up against the bad cops we need good tow operators to demand that the bad ones be punished and stopped.

A lot of time it's due to the way they configure their rules that a member has to sign on with to join...and you just need some assholes to screw with things to create trouble. Most of the time for the sales thing, it's more of a situation with something like an abandoned property and fines build up until the total is enough that they can go about things with it.