Rebuttal to Bogus Domestic Auto Transport reply to Auto Transport Group Review
Ron Cully
Submitted this review about
Auto Shipping Group LLC
Review made Live: 2/6/2014 10:04:00 AM
I posted my initial review on Auto Shipping Group on 1/28/2014. The company response is full of misinformation and this is to set the record straight and give details on how Auto Shipping Group, Domestic Auto Transport and other companies owned by one guy are illegally operating and manipulating reviews on TransportReviews.com.
The issue isn’t about whether my car got delivered and how quickly it arrived. It did get delivered, it got there fast because of the carrier (nothing to do with Domestic or ASG). This is about bait & switch on what company is doing the work without me knowing, verbal commitment drift, risk management with unlicensed companies, consumer deception and review manipulation.
IMPORTANT: I ordered my shipping through Domestic Auto Transport, NOT Auto Shipping Group. Domestic is not authorized and is un-bonded to operate as a broker and has no business license in the state they operate from (WA). Without my knowledge, they processed the order through Auto Shipping Group which does have a license and authority which made me a unwitting customer of Auto Shipping Group.
Both companies are owned by the same guy (Terry Williams) as well as 5 other companies that are also involved in this scam. What Domestic did is illegal at a state and federal level. In the end, Domestic asked for a 5-star review with an incentive that I might win all my transport costs back if I give them a 5-star review. But the review link they gave did not go to Domestic—it went to Auto Shipping Group. They are doing this to manipulate reviews and make Auto Shipping Group look like the #1 company to work with. When I posted a 2-star review because they did an OK job, Auto Shipping Group tried to block my review by claiming I wasn’t a customer. It was only after a few hours of effort on my part that I was able to get my review up. Then Ms. Freiley responded with a bunch of nonsense which blocked my ability to reply. TransportReviews told me I can post a new review to do the response so here it is.
In Ms. Freiley’s reply she states they don’t “buy reviews” as I suggested. “Customer go on to this website and put their own comments on this site. They are not paid for any reviews whether they are zero stars or 5 stars”
The following is from the email Ms. Freiley sent me.
*****
“ENTER YOUR 5 STAR REVIEW TODAY, FOR A CHANCE TO WIN YOUR ENTIRE TRANSPORT COST BACK!!!
I wanted to send a special thanks to you for choosing Domestic Auto Transport Inc.. It was a pleasure assisting you with your auto relocation.
We are currently running a contest for our valued clients. Every Customer who leaves us a 5 star review will be entered into a drawing. At the end of the month we will draw a WINNER. If you are selected as our winner, we will contact you and you will receive a FULL refund of your Entire Transport Cost. Below are the instructions to enter your 5 STAR review.”
*****
What this mail offer is legally called is a contest. Contests have legal requirements in (I believe) every state to include details about the odds, details about who is sponsoring, a variety of other legal disclosures, even requirements about the font sizes of the legal disclosures. The contest offer they sent is void of all of these and is hence an illegal contest. It would be interesting to verify Domestic has ever paid out to the people who inflated their reviews in hopes of winning their shipping costs. After all, it would seem like a high probability contest given the number of transactions by a single company. It is even more likely given that Domestic has not had a single review since November 2013. As such, there should have been a 100% chance that I would get a refund.
I wish I could post the actual HTML of their contest email here. The link Ms. Freiley supplied filled out the form for Auto Shipping Group and not Domestic Auto Transport. By doing this, this illegally operating and non-authorized sister company is filling up Auto Shipping Group with 5-star reviews. In fact if you look at the TransportReviews.com trend information on Auto Shipping Group, you will see ASG went from no reviews in November, to around 20 reviews in December, to over 180 reviews in January with an average rating of nearly 5.0.
People with a bad experience are 10 times more likely to post negative than people with a positive experience. How is it they get this amazing 5-star rating consistently? Besides fraudulently loading 5-star reviews through an illegal contest, they suppress negative review. If you post a negative review to the link you get from Domestic (or another sister company) that posts to Auto Shipping Group’s score, Auto Shipping Group tells TransportReview.com that you were not their customer. It was only after taking extra time to forward my emails and a copy of my bank records showing the charge was registered by Auto Shipping Group that my valid review was posted.
As proof, here is part of the email I received from TransportReviews.com:
*****
“This email is to let you know your review was removed from our site at www.transportreviews.com. The reason for removal is that Auto Shipping Group Inc. is unable to locate your order and has no way of proving that you are a customer of theirs…..
….If you have the correct company then we need information from you that shows you are a customer of this company. A customer for Transport Reviews.com is "someone who went beyond a reasonable quote and sales process."
Please email and/or fax us documentation showing you went beyond the quote and sales process.
Some great documents include:
A credit card or bank statement showing a charge from the company.
A bill-of-lading showing a vehicle shipped and the company name.
Emails showing the status or confirmation of an order being placed.
DO NOT let the company tell you you were not a customer.”
*****
In Ms. Freiley’s response to my initial posting, she states: “We do have authority…. Here is our authority number for anyone who wants to check: MC Number: MC-600841 US DOT Number: 2239008”
It is true this is the active FMCSA authority numbers for Auto Shipping Group. But, my order was originally through Domestic Auto Transport. That is part of the bait and switch. I ordered through Domestic but the order was fulfilled by ASG. Domestic as well as all of the other sister companies that ASG lists on the TransportReviews.com web site are NOT-AUTHORIZED on the FMCSA web site. The fact that Domestic took the initial order makes this illegal because each independent company is required by the USDOT to have a separate $75,000 bond and an authorization on the FMCSA web site to take the order. In fact Domestic Auto Transport and the other 5 sister companies do not even hold active business licenses and are operating illegally at the state level in addition to operating illegally at the federal level.
The following link is where you can verify that any company acting as a broker must post a $75,000 bond in order to act as an auto shipping broker. If they are authorized, they have a posted bond. If they are not authorized, then they don't have a bond posted.
http://safer.fmcsa.dot.gov/
The following link is where you can look up the FMCSA and DOT licenses and verify that none of the Terry Williams’ companies have authority to act as a broker except for Auto Shipping Group.
http://safer.fmcsa.dot.gov/CompanySnapshot.aspx
You can look up the Terry Williams’ companies by name, or by their last assigned but NOT AUTHORIZED numbers. You will find that only Auto Shipping Group has an authorized number:
Company Name MC # USDOT #
Transport Holding Company, Inc MC-500874 2233006
Domestic Auto Transport, INC MC-640011 2241807
Red Carpet Auto Transport MC-603064 2239188
Cascade Vehicle Shipping n/a n/a
Magic Carpet Auto Transport n/a n/a
The Car Transporters MC-732681 2247936
Auto Shipping Group, Inc MC-600841 2239008
The following are the business look-up pages for Arizona, Oregon and Washington Secretaries of State where you can verify that all Terry Williams’ companies have inactive business licenses in the states they operate in with the exception of Auto Shipping Group and Transport Holding Company which filed for its business license only last November 20, 2013. Just type in the company names from the list above in their search form.
http://sos.oregon.gov/business/Pages/find.aspx
http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/search_advanced.aspx
http://starpas.azcc.gov/scripts/cgiip.exe/WService=wsbroker1/main.p
In my initial review I complained about how the charges drifted upward in the process of my order. Ms. Freiley said this was all in my contract. But lets talk about what happened in the process. In my first phone call, Ms. Freiley told me verbally that Domestic charged $250. On my second call a couple days later to set things up, Ms. Freiley told me I needed to pay a $300 deposit to get things started (which I assumed went to the $250 broker fee and $50 toward the shipment). During that call the topic of COD came up. When I said I wanted to pay COD instead of you paying, suddenly the $300 deposit was a $300 broker fee (up from the $250 in the initial phone call). There was no mention at all of an additional fee to use a credit card in that call. I asked if anything else needed to be done to get things going and I was told NO. To be very clear, these companies are operating as Internet businesses. On-line businesses run on credit cards and debit cards. I don’t know any legitimate Internet businesses that tack on a credit card processing fee to an order. I’m not even sure if that is legal to do (I know at one point it was illegal to add a charge for credit cards but it was legal to give a discount for cash). Regardless, there was significant drift in the original verbal commitment of $250 to the final charge on my card of $307.50. In hind sight I should have recognized that as a flag of an unethical business and should have gone a different direction. I think other consumers should be aware that this is how Domestic (and likely their sister companies) operate.
The following is the text of my original posting:
=======================================================
Do not call or use the Auto Shipping Group, Cascade Vehicle Shipping or their now unlicensed but still active companies Domestic Auto Transport, Magic Carpet. They are using unscrupulous methods to buy 5-star reviews through a lottery scheme while deleting non-5-star reviews by saying the reviewer isn’t a customer.
October 1, 2013 the FMCSA (http://safer.fmcsa.dot.gov/) required all brokers to post a $75,000 bond. All the Auto Shipping Group companies were owned by Terry Williams. Rather than pay the broker fee, these companies have lost their authority but the companies continue to be listed here. And if you call Domestic Auto Transport, they will answer the phone and they will take your orders as Domestic WITHOUT authority (like they did for me). I’ve also discovered there are complaints that around the time these shutdowns occurred, they took deposits from people, posted the cars as COD, and never paid the truckers. As a result, people had problems getting their cars.
In my case I called Domestic Auto Transport based on their 5-star reviews not knowing all these linkages between the Terry Williams’ companies. My car did get picked up and delivered as I requested it be COD, so they only took the broker fee which went from $250 in a phone conversation to $300, which ended up being $307.50 on my debit card transaction.
Domestic then started sending lots of requests to me by email for a 5-star review and said if I gave them one I would be entered into a lottery to get a refund of my entire shipping. My reviews are earned, not bought and they didn’t do stellar so I wasn’t going to review. But finally I relented and gave an honest 2-star review (below) using the links they sent me in email. The link automatically filled out a lot of the fields including the company name Auto Shipping Group (which was confusing to me because I never saw that name in any of my transactions with them). After it posted, ASG removed my review saying I was never a customer. But the details of the car and the two end points of the shipment in my post were from THEIR email to me, and now looking at my debit card the withdrawl was by Auto Shipping Group (NOT Domestic Transport).
When I got the message from Transport Reviews that ASG deleted my review, I did deeper research on Domestic (who I had called) and that is when I discovered the info about ASG, the FMCSA etc. If you click through more detail on Transport Reviews, you can even see the association between the companies. Look up Domestic Auto Transport and it says they are part of Transport Holding Company and that their FMCSA number can’t be verified; their address is 1700 Main St. Washugal WA. Look up Transport Holding Company and you will see its FMCSA can’t be verified and that it is operating as Magic Carpet Auto Transport and it has not address. Click on Magic Carpet and you will see it has an FMCSA number that is INACTIVE and an address of 1700 Main St. Washugal WA. And then if you look up Auto Shipping Group you will see it has an active FMCSA number and it is also at 1700 Main St. Washugal WA. And if you read through the reviews, you will see Domestic mentioned on Magic Carpet.
I then went a step further and started looking these companies up on the FMCSA web site. It shows Domestic Auto Transport as a Portland company (across the bridge over the Columbia from Washugal) and it shows they are an unauthorized broker. You will not even find Magic Carpet Auto Transport or Cascade Vehicle Shipping on their site. And when you look up Auto Shipping Group, it has an address of 700 NE 4th, Camas WA (not Washugal). These are all the same people operating under different aliases, a couple operating illegally and one operating with an FMCSA number and all tied back to Terry Williams.
Essentially what they are doing is leaving the defunct companies on Transport Reviews to capture leads, they then process orders illegally because these companies don’t have authority to broker. Then they buy a 5-star review by enticing people with a lottery to get their shipping refunded 100% and they give you a link so your review gets posted under ASG’s name on Transport Reviews to make it look good. This strategy will let them build a massive number of 5-star reviews for ASG even though they got them under other brand names that are operating illegally. If you post a bad review, they delete it saying that you were not an ASG customer (because you used Domestic or Magic Carpet). They count on most people just giving up at that point because its not worth their time (except I hate people that do this kind of scamming).
This Terry Williams looks pretty unethical. My car was either shipped illegally without authority by Domestic which is run by Terry Williams, or it was done as ASG behind the scenes under Domestic’s name. Either way what they are doing is fraudulent to consumers and illegal from a federal shipping perspective.
Transport Reviews needs to do a thorough investigation on ASG and frankly they should be blackballed from Transport Reviews for manipulating reviews and operating illegally through their referral web site. As for me, I'm planning a complaint to the FMCSA.
The following is my initial review that ASG deleted…
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I started calling brokers when I wasn't getting action on my car shipment that the Atlanta car dealer had posted on Central Dispatch. I talked to Bill Avrich at Transport connection who was a bit to crusty for me, but he is dead honest about what he will do to get you a good price. I then called Domestic Auto Transport who sounded professional and not so crusty.
Domestic told me they wouldn't do anything because they didn't want to interfere with the dealer and it would cost me an extra $250 vs. having the dealer make a couple small changes. They said the posting was a little low, the posting was not listed as COD (a big deal), and that a destination of Coeur d' Alene ID was unattractive. They said if I increased the price to $1,100, listed as COD, and set the destination to Spokane that it would get picked up.
I called the dealer and asked them to make the changes. After a few days the car didn't get picked up so I called Domestic back and asked them to take over because they had made a material recommendation to me at no charge and I decided reciprocal action was appropriate (I was a torn because I talked to Bill first but felt like Domestic had given me something).
It turns out the dealer didn't change the destination or the COD (only the price). If I had posted on Central Dispatch myself I could have gotten that right. A few days later I got a call and was told a driver contacted them and said he would do it for $1,300. I was frustrated some because ASG said they could get this done for less, but the car had been sitting there for a couple weeks by now so I accepted the deal.
Now it comes out the ASG fee was $300- not sure what happened to the $250 from my initial contact which is what other brokers charge. I'm also not sure what Domestic really did to negotiate a good price to earn their money since now it was up $200 from what they told me to post. All they really did was post on central dispatch and ask me to accept what a driver offered. So in the end it cost me $1,600 for something I could have done on my own for $1,300.
What really frosted me was that Domestic came back and said I could get my shipping for free if I posted a 5-star review. I don't work like that. If you earn it, I will post it. But they didn't. I wasn't going to post anything at all but they just kept sending the emails to post and maybe win my shipping costs. It was clear to me that the 5-star review record they get doesn't come from their service but for the lottery game they play that if you give a 5-star you might get your money back. So instead of play the lottery, I'm telling you straight.
Domestic was OK in that they understand how to post on Central Dispatch to get action. Their fee was higher than Transport connection, and they didn't do anything to negotiate a good price. They aren't horrible, but they didn't really work for me to get their $300.
If Bill reads this he will likely be saying "serves me right... I told you so...." Bill shot straight with how he does his job. And because my parents ran a very successful trucking company for over 20 years I know Bill's approach works (as crusty as it may be). When Bill told me what would happen if I used him, he nailed everything right down to the cultural detail of who actually picked up my car.
In hind sight I wish I would have turned it over to Bill. He knows the language of truckers and I'm confident he would have gotten the $1,300 offer down to the $1,100 of the bid for $50 less than Domestic. It would have cost me $50 more than if I had tried to do it on my own (I'm not a great negotiator so I probably would have ended up at $1,300 plus my time).
If you don't want to do the Central Dispatch work yourself, go to Transport Connection. You might not like Bill's salty style but I'm confident he will go to bat for you and I didn't feel like Domestic did that. If you have the time and energy to manage your own Central Dispatch posting and you *really* think you can negotiate with truckers, then you can do that. But remember that knowing the reputation of the truckers who respond is more valuable than the price. You don't want your car floating all over the country on a fly-by-night operator's truck. I'm sure Bill has a lot of war scars to make sure you steer clear of those kinds of headaches. The fact he 100% nailed the details on what type of company would pick up my car, what the truckers would be like, etc... tells me he knows how to only accept from companies you would want carrying your car for you.
