As an example I parked my car to drop my daughter off at a party and paid online - but mistyped the little number for the car park and ended up paying for 3 hours parking somewhere across the country.
Naturally the private car park tries to charge me 20x the parking fee as a “fine” - which they can whistle for frankly. But they sent varying letters that sound but don’t actually say “court” or “legal action” (things like “solicitors action prior to court”
I kept sending them the same answer they kept rejecting it
Then they actually sued me in county court. Oh wow I thought I better pay. And as a court judgement is really bad on credit record (one above bankruptcy) it’s serious. But I checked the court website anyway to be extra careful. And Incoukd challenge it - actually appear before the beak and say “hey it’s not my fault”.
So I filled in the form that says “yes I will challenge it, see you in court”
That might my wife said don’t be fucking stupid they have won pay them
So I went back the next day - and guess what - they had after 9 months withdrawn their action against me, no further need to progress, cancelled
I called the court to find out WTF
They had, and do every week, mass spammed the court with hundreds of parking cases, knowing that pretty much everyone would act like my wife pay a couple of hundred quid not to risk their credit record. I mean a county court judgement and you can kiss a mortgage goodbye.
That is simple abuse - an overworked courts system, hundreds probably thousands of rubbish claims that are put simply to strong arm people to pay up with legal threats, and no genuine attempt to filter out cases with merit, or even only look at “repeat offenders”
But is it worth the time of any parliamentarian to take this on (well frankly yes it would be great backbencher cause celeb, but what do I know.
Anyhow there was a point here - there are many many legitimate companies whose ficking business model is based on legal strong arming anyone who makes a minor infraction and that’s ok, but having a scam my business model to fight the scammy business model is bad?
Yes DoNotPay could have stayed on the right side of the line - but then would frankly run out of money. I guess we can only put our Hope in the hands of our elected representatives:-)