Our automotive accident and workshop ‘Black Economy’ continues year after year.
The biggest and fast rising car workshop business in Malaysia is probably the best job to be in after a politician. Yes, this is an industry that involves a lot of ‘players’ and the financial rewards are just fantastic.
Let us explain, in case the above is all new to you. Have you ever wondered why whenever you have or witness a car accident on a major road, highway or intersection, within minutes of the accident ‘HELP’ arrives? Yes, the ‘HELP’ we are talking about is the ‘AGENTS’ who hand you a name-card claiming to be from an authorized workshop for your accident car brand.
Yes, no matter what brand of car you are driving, from Perodua to Porsche, these ‘AGENTS’ will guarantee a 100 percent quality job and within a few more minutes there will be more ‘AGENTS’ arriving to offer the same great and wonderful trouble free service.
These are the first line of crooks that will get you to sign over your car to them and they will get their partnership tow truck operators to quickly come and tow your car away.
Once they have your car on their partner tow truck your car will NOT go the workshop as while on the move they are on the phone talking to a few workshop owners to get the best commission for bringing in your accident vehicle.
After a deal is done. Your car is taken to the highest bidder and then your car is left in the hands of the workshop owner. They can now ‘whack’ a 300-500 percent margin on a repair bill to the insurance company.
The insurance adjuster will come for an accident inspection. Before he arrives, the workshop will quickly damage more parts on your car so that they can increase the repair bill, they will remove some expensive parts and say that your car arrived as is and have extra scratches done on your car body to say you will need a full paint re-spray.
How do we know this? Well we have seen it for ourselves and we have seen accident damaged cars with small rear damage having ‘additional’ work done to them.
Next comes negotiations between the workshop owner and the insurance adjuster on the final bill. Now when work starts, about 99 percent of workshops will use used car parts, second hand junkyard parts and reinstall some of your own parts which they removed earlier. Then a low quality re-spray will be done just to satisfy the insurance adjusters digital camera.
When the car owner comes to collect their car, they are never satisfied with the final job and most of the time they will need to take our extra money to get a proper finish.
Meanwhile a repair bill that should have cost RM2088.10 becomes RM10,560,98 as shared below. Yes, this is a quote received by a luxury car owner for a small accident damage from an authorized workshop.
If the damaged car owner were to pay by himself the amount is a reasonable RM2k but if they are claiming from the insurance company (which we have masked to prevent any unwanted issue to arise) the amount is turned up by 500 percent to RM10k.
We have removed any sensitive information to prevent a lawsuit and the protect the identity of the car owner who wanted to share this with us after reading our recent article on the massive fraud in the automotive industry.
