The repo man knocked on the door, polite as always, and said he just needed to get her stuff out of the car before he hooked it up. My girlfriend at the time, who would later become my wife, had forgotten to make her car payments for the third time. Apparently, after that many misses, they don’t call anymore. They just come get it.
I always thought that was decent of him, letting her grab her things. He didn’t have to do that. He could have just hooked it and been gone. But he waited, and she dug through the back seat, pulling out old receipts, a jacket, some CDs.
He stood there patient, not rushing her. Then he drove off with the car, and that was that. I did some repo work myself once, and I never had a gun pulled on me. I was never threatened over a repo.
Most of them were boring, honestly. The owners knew they were behind, and they knew why we were there. They’d hand over the keys or just let us do our job. The worst thing I dealt with was a guy who wouldn’t control his dog while I hooked up his tractor.
I didn’t get bit, but that dog was all over me, and I couldn’t focus. I kept thinking, this is a good way to get your dog shot. People shouldn’t turn animals into weapons. There was this one woman, though, who hid her car from us for months.
Every night she moved it. Never left it in the same place twice. We’d get a tip, show up, and she’d already be gone. It was a cat-and-mouse game, pure and simple.
One guy took his wheels off every single night. Made it a pain in the neck to even roll it out of the driveway. I’ll tell you what though, that job taught me some things about people. When they’re behind, they get desperate.
And desperate people do strange things. I had a boss once who told me that if they don’t come out shooting when you arrive, they probably aren’t going to shoot you at all. That held up pretty true for me. But my buddy, he wasn’t so lucky.
He had an owner run up to his truck, stick a gun in the window, and shoot him once in the chest. My buddy’s a big guy, so he took it pretty well. Didn’t even slow down. He just hit the gas and got the hell out of there.
Took the bullet like it was nothing. Bad mother. My uncle and my dad were both repo guys at different points, and they’ve got stories that would curl your hair. My uncle carried pepper spray because he’d been attacked by so many dogs.
His boss wouldn’t let them come back empty-handed, no matter how dangerous things got. He told me about this one time he had to kick his own car door open with his foot just to keep a dog off him. That’s the kind of thing that stays with you. My dad did repo for heavy machinery, which is a whole different beast.
These weren’t used cars. These were machines worth half a million dollars. He got shot at several times. Offerred massive amounts of drugs, usually meth, as payment instead of money.
And there was this one guy who started calling him constantly, threatening him, day and night. Turns out that guy was dealing drugs in a big way. Construction guys in our area really liked him, so he had plenty of business. He ended up doing a long stretch in jail for it.
My dad didn’t have to worry about him anymore after that. There was this one repo that was a first payment default, which is always the worst kind. We had talked to the couple earlier in the week, and they promised they’d be home by closing time on Friday. Closing time came and went.
No sign of them. So we drove out to the house anyway. We pulled up to the driveway, and there was the car, plain as day. We overshot the driveway a bit, so we turned around, made a U-turn, and headed back.
In the time it took us to spin around, they had moved the car behind the house. And they were destroying it. Windows smashed. Body panels dented with chains.
Some unidentifiable liquid poured all over the seats. They were violent toward us, too. Threatening us with their pit bull. Hitting us.
One of them threw keys at my partner’s head. About a year later, the guy who originally bought it came walking into our lot, wanting to buy another car. Felt real good to tell him to get the hell off the property. Not the smartest move, but it felt right at the time.
I used to work for a property management company, and one time I got asked to go check out a house after the renters got evicted. I went with the maintenance man, and we were absolutely floored when we walked in. The house was empty. And I mean empty.
There were no appliances. No kitchen cupboards. The sink was gone, the storage area was gone, even the plumbing was gone. All the wiring in the house, gone.
Two fireplaces, gone. Brick fronts taken off, inside chimneys pulled out. Everything in the living room, gone. Carpet, gone.
Even the carpet liner, down to the cement. Both bathrooms, stripped. Plumbing, shower tubs, sinks, storage closets, doors, all gone. Three bedrooms, gutted.
Doors throughout the house, gone. Even the poles for hanging clothes in the closets, gone. They took the windows, too. Left the storms behind.
Hot water heater, gone. Furnace and AC, gone. Even the bushes outside had been ripped out. The outside light pole, gone.
All the wiring and outlets, gone. Some of the sheetrock itself, removed. It was like they’d scooped out every single thing that could be carried off. When we finally got our jaws off the floor, we checked with the neighbors.
They said, yeah, they’d been very busy in that house. Day after day, truckload after truckload
I was so mad that I just had to laugh. The company owner went out to look at it himself, came back looking shell-shocked. We never found those people.
And believe me, we looked for a long time. I still picture it sometimes, like something out of a cartoon, the whole house picked clean like the Grinch stole Christmas. I knew a guy whose boss had a story about a couple that rented a TV from an Aaron’s and skipped out on the bills. When they rolled up to the house to get it back, they found out the owners had built the TV straight into the wall.
Framed it in nice, made it look intentional, like it belonged there. The boss told them he needed to take it. They said fine, but he had to get it out himself, and he couldn’t damage the house. So he took off his shoe, used it to smash the glass on the front of the TV, then turned to them and said, we’ll write it off.
And left. Most badass thing I ever heard. I can’t imagine how peeved those people were. I mean, it really wasn’t their property at all.
Goodwill and garage sales are your friends, dear rental owners. I had an employee once, years ago, who used to be a repo man. His best story was about ingenuity, not violence. He’d been tasked with repossessing vehicles from a bunch of unsavory types, folks who weren’t going to go down without a fight.
So instead of putting himself in danger, he just showed up at their property with a big load of cheap liquor. Told them they’d won a contest from the local liquor store. Then he came back about three hours later, after they’d had plenty of time to celebrate, and removed the vehicle without any trouble at all. The old cheapo repo.
Worked every time. A friend of mine told me about an unethical tow truck driver. He was sitting in a Subway parking lot waiting for his wife to arrive. She got there after about twenty minutes, and they went inside to eat.
He looked out the window, and there was a tow truck taking his car. He ran out after it, followed by his pregnant wife, followed by the Subway guy carrying a giant loaf of bread. They argued for a bit, someone called the cops, and the repo guy ended up getting towed to jail himself. Turns out he’d been pretending to be a cop and extorting money out of people.
The story made a lot more sense once I realized they were in a Subway parking lot, not a subway station. One of the craziest stories I ever heard came from a guy I baby-sat for. He worked in repo, and he told me about this co-worker of his. He got called out to repo a woman’s truck.
Got there, started hooking up chains and all the equipment. This lady comes running out of her office, jumps in the truck, and speeds off. Little did she know the repo man had accidentally chained himself to the back of the truck. She drug him for almost a mile.
Killed him. My dad does vehicle repossessions, and he’s got a whole slew of stories. One that stands out happened a few years ago. He went to pick up a truck, got it hooked up, and was getting ready to leave when the owner came running out waving his hands in the air, saying he wanted to get his stuff out of the vehicle.
My dad, being the nice guy he is, stopped and told him he could grab whatever he wanted. Even told him he could sign some paperwork to make getting the truck back a little cheaper. As my dad’s relaying this, the guy lifts up a fold of fat and pulls a handgun on him, tells him to put the vehicle down. My dad dropped the vehicle, jumped in his own truck, and got the hell out of dodge with the one he was already in.
Not me, but my cousin used to buy up houses, polish them up, and resell them. He had this one family living in a house that got repossessed. When they went to inspect the property, the wife came out screaming that nobody was taking her house. She didn’t even know why it had been repossessed.
Turns out, the way she and her husband made it work was that she paid all the utility bills and he paid for the house itself. Problem was, he hadn’t been paying on the house for about six months at that point. Never told her a thing. They fought tooth and nail to keep it, but it was already too late.
It belonged to my cousin now. In the end, my cousin and her husband actually helped them move out. And when they left, they took the wires with them. The electrical wires, pulled straight out of all the walls.
Some of the pipes, too. This happens more than you’d think. I do loans for cars now, not houses, but I see the same pattern over and over. It’s not uncommon for a husband to think his wife is making the car payment when she’s not.
Or vice versa. And then he finds out around the time we’re ready to pick up the car. That’s always a fun conversation. When I was a stupid college kid, I bought a new car.
I had a job and was making payments on time, but then I lost that job, and the new one I got didn’t pay enough to cover the car. So it had to be repossessed. I was at school two hours away, so the repo guys never saw my car, because it was always parked at my parents’ house when I wasn’t using it. I came back for spring break, and they called me up and told me they’d spotted it, and they were going to come pick it up the next day.
I handed them the keys, no fuss, no fight, and they left. Next day, I’m out with a friend, and I get a call from another repo man. Super angry, yelling at me over the phone. Where’s the car?
Apparently he’d been to my parents’ house, and my brother was the only one home. He’d forced my brother to open the garage door to check if the car was in there, even after my brother told him someone had already picked it up. I told him the same thing. He ended the call with, for your sake, you better be right.
It was kind of scary, honestly. And I’m pretty sure he wasn’t allowed to have my brother open that garage. After that, I decided I’d just buy cheap cars outright and drive them until they fell apart. There was another repo company around where I worked that was bolder than most.
This guy, the same one who repossessed a car in the toy store parking lot on Christmas Eve. We had a customer that kept her car in a fenced yard. In our state, you can’t repo something if it’s fenced in or in a garage. So he watched her, waited to see if she’d drive it somewhere.
Eventually she did. He spotted her in the drive-thru at the bank. He pulled in front of her, blocking her in. There was another car behind her, so she couldn’t back out either.
He convinced her to get out of the car. Then he hooked it up and took it off. A guy I knew worked for a collection agency for car payments. His approach was a little different.
He’d call people up, offer them some incredible deal if they’d just come down to the office to sign some papers. Then, while they were inside talking, he’d have someone else go repossess the car right out of the parking lot. He even had security at the door so they couldn’t get back in once they figured it out. Former repo guy here.
Almost every day on that job produced some kind of madness. There was this one crappy Chevy Malibu that stands out. It was a straw buy. Someone bought the vehicle, gave it to someone who wasn’t on the credit app, and then never made a single payment.
Multiple companies searched for that car for years. After a couple weeks of skip tracing, we found it parked at a crappy house in the ghetto. The people there thought they were smart. They had a locked gate around the property.
My partner and I took apart that gate until we could swing it open, then backed our truck into the driveway. The people were furious, naturally, but they couldn’t prove we’d done anything wrong. We got a nice bonus for that one. Lucky for us they didn’t have cameras.
If they’d had footage of us dismantling that gate, we’d have been screwed. I also knew a guy who had a car repossessed after his parents filed for bankruptcy back in 2007. It was a 2003 Kia Magentis with all the bells and whistles. Not a thing wrong with it.
Only four years old. Just had slightly high mileage from all his dad’s business trips. The repo man came to his dad’s work to take it, looked at it, and said, nah, I don’t want it. Then he left.
They got to keep a thirty-six thousand dollar car for just four years worth of payments. It crapped out in 2010, but still. That’s a win in anyone’s book. My grandfather used to have a saying.
He’d look at some shiny new car rolling by, snort, and say, that’s a nice car the bank owns. And there’s a lot of truth to that. Depending on the state, repo agents can’t enter a secured property even if the thing they need to repo is sitting right there in plain sight. Some people know that, so they hide their cars behind fences and gates.
But not all repo guys follow the law, either. If you’re going to rely on that, you better have a camera on it to prove they broke the rules. I used to work at a credit union as a loan officer. I had a repo’d guy’s car taken.
About a week later, he takes the bus home from work around one in the morning. The bus stop was a couple miles from his house, and his mom was supposed to pick him up, but she overslept. So he started walking home down a fairly busy road in the sketchy part of town. Someone hit him in a hit-and-run.
They never caught the driver. They found him dead in a ditch the next morning. I don’t know why I still think about that one. It wasn’t my fault.
But it stays with you. There’s this one repo that I’ll never forget. Old-time favorite kind of story. Years ago, we had a customer who took out a loan for a vehicle.
In the beginning, she paid very well. But all of a sudden her payments kept getting further and further behind, until she was way in trouble. She called the manager to talk about what she could do, and she told him her son had heart problems, was in the local children’s hospital. We worked out something for her, but she still didn’t make payments.
She came into the office one day when another lady and I were the only two there. She told us all about her son’s illness, that he might need heart surgery. Her son wasn’t even school age yet. We’d seen that child before.
He’d come into the office with his mother more than once. We were heartbroken for her. She was crying, and we were crying with her. I asked if she’d like my church to pray for her child and her family.
She said she would. No names were used, but a person we knew thought he recognized the family from what she’d told us. He went to speak to them. Later he told me he must have been wrong, because the child of the family he knew was perfectly well.
I didn’t tell him anything. I didn’t even answer clearly. But when he told me the name of the family he’d gone to see, I knew immediately that was my customer. She’d been lying to us that entire time.
Not only was that child not in the hospital, he’d never even been sick. Her husband didn’t know she had the loan at all. He certainly didn’t know his son was being used as an excuse for not paying it. We repossessed that car in the parking lot of a toy store on Christmas Eve.
It had Santa Claus in the back seat. I still think about that stupid woman sometimes. I wonder if she and her husband are even still married. No doubt she’s the same kind of person she always was.
But I still think about that Santa Claus in the back seat, wait for us to haul it all away. I’ve also seen debtors do some truly crazy things. There was a woman about to have her car repoed who jumped between the tow truck and her car, screaming that she was eight months pregnant and that if the guy wanted her truck, he’d have to run her over and be a baby killer. There was a guy who had his truck being repoed, so he got in his other car and ran over the tow driver while he was hooking it up.
There was another woman who freaked out screaming that her wallet was in the back seat. The driver let her open the door to get it, and she jumped in the back seat and said she wasn’t leaving. He shrugged, drove to their storage lot a couple miles away, with her screaming in horror the entire way. Wasn’t a hundred percent legal, but I enjoyed that story later.
Then there was a guy who charged out with a rifle after the driver had already hooked up his truck and was pulling out of the driveway. He shot at him. The driver dove out of the truck, called the cops, and the guy got arrested. A couple weeks later, we got a call from him, saying he’d paid off his truck and gotten it back, but he wanted to report damage to the vehicle caused by our driver.
What damage? A bullet hole. Currently work in a repo yard. Our drivers get guns pulled on them all the time.
We have to swap out the outside panels on our tow trucks almost monthly, on account of debtors shooting at them as they drive away. Most of these people honestly think we’re stealing their stuff. And some of them park their cars two miles from their house just to throw us off. You own a car, sort of.
But you walk two miles to and from it every day just to keep it from being taken. I’ve found cars up to a mile from people’s workplaces. Best one was a woman who parked her car in the garage at home and in a secure garage at work. I parked my truck a couple houses down and just walked by her house around when she left for work.
The garage door opened. She started her car. Then she went back inside for something. I jumped in her car and drove away.
It was completely illegal for me to go in that garage. But the possibility of losing that awful job was worth listening to her scream at me at the top of her lungs as I screeched out of there. I’ve seen people hide cars in the woods behind their houses. We had one debtor who bought a brand new car, never made a single payment, and kept it hidden back there for over a year.
We probably never would have found it, but people like to talk. He bragged about it to his co-workers. One day, one of them called us anonymously, because she was tired of hearing about it. We found it that night.
We’ve also repoed cars from guys at Christmas parties, and from a lady who walked into our office to make a half payment, six or seven months past due, thinking that was good enough. We had to scramble to get an agent there before she left. I had a man jump off a second story balcony while his friend screamed at me. He botched the jump, broke something, got up for a moment, then fell again.
I laughed. We took his car anyway. Through all of it, though, I’ve seen the other side too. There was a time when my own car got repossessed by mistake.
The bank had been applying my payments to someone else’s account, somehow failed to call me and ask why I was three months behind when I wasn’t. The repo guy showed up, hooked up my car, knocked on my door, politely asked if I wanted to remove my property, helped me carry my stuff out, apologized, and wished me better luck in the future. When the bank realized their mistake, he towed it back to a local parking lot so I wouldn’t have to drive two hours to his yard to pick it up. I got three months of credit for the inconvenience.
And that, right there, is why I always say repo men are people, too. Recently, my wife and I hit a rough patch. Decrease in income, had to decide what to do about her car payment. We eventually just stopped paying, and she called them up and told them, hey, come get the car.
We’re going with something cheaper. That was five months ago. They just came to get it two nights ago. They were very cool about it, apologetic even.
One guy said, hey, sorry. And I said, nah, it’s good. We got a replacement. They weren’t dongs about it at all.
Probably because we called instead of hiding the car or lying. Funny how that works. Word of advice from someone who’s seen it all. Don’t try buying things you can’t afford.
Life would be a whole lot easier. Some people never learn that. But the ones who do, they’re the ones who get to keep their dignity at the end of it all.