Bent Out of Shape Over Roadside Repairs

To convince a potential but wary customer, he said, he shows off pictures of perfect before and after body work. Other than that, he said, "we just talk our heads off." There is no way for customers to know if Siganoff actually worked on the cars in the pictures. And if someone is dissatisfied with his work, he said, they do not have to pay for it. "That doesn't really happen," he said.

Auto body shop managers say they occasionally get outraged calls from people saying a man who worked for the body shop had botched a private repair job. Convincing them it was an impostor takes work.

"The Lindsay organization has been plagued by this same scam for about two years now," said Tim Doyle, director of operations for the Lindsay Collision Center in Springfield. "They approach that person and tell them they work for Lindsay and that they can fix that dent for $200. One time a victim of this scam wanted to walk through my shop to see if that person really worked here."

Matt Frei, chief correspondent in Washington for the British Broadcasting Corp., can't believe he fell for it. He's so mad at himself for letting two family cars get worked on by a con man that he says he and the charlatan who botched the work "deserve each other."

Several different dent repairers had come to Frei's Northwest house offering to fix the dents in the family's street-weary Ford Windstar minivan and BMW convertible sitting in the driveway. At first he resisted, but one day this spring, his resolve crumbled under pressure from a talkative dent repairer and his young son. Frei bargained the guy down to an acceptable sum.

"I finally ended up paying seven hundred bucks in cash for both those cars, which for a nanosecond seemed like a good deal but very quickly began to seem like an utter rip-off," Frei said. "Because $700 for two or maybe three hours' work is a pretty good hourly rate."

What's worse, as soon as Frei had agreed to the deal, the dent worker started drilling holes in the body of the minivan to yank out the dents. Seeing that was "a shock to the system," Frei said.

The dent fixers commonly drill holes in a car's metal to pull out the dents. But professional dent repair workers say it is almost never okay to perforate the body of a car because that can cause rust.

"Even if you putty over it, putty is porous. It'll rust under that putty," said Joe Mattos, owner of Mattos Pro Finishes, a chain of auto paint and supply stores based in Temple Hills.

Mike Anderson, the owner of Wagonwork Collision Center in Alexandria, said a customer he had this spring had damage to her fender that would have cost about $400 to repair. But she let a dent repairer talk her into fixing her car while she did her grocery shopping -- and ended up having to replace the whole fender for $1,600. She asked Anderson not to tell anyone -- including her husband.

"Most people are so embarrassed by it, that they fell victim to it, that they don't tell anybody about it," he said.

Another hallmark of the work is mismatched paint. Some dent repair victims say they were told they could go to any body shop to buy paint for the car or get a quick paint job.

Susan Demers of Bethesda could not get paint for her Honda from the Honda dealership, so she ordered paint to match her car from a New York distributor, per the instructions of the man who had repaired her dented door for $175. She did not want to pay him $100 to paint it, so he told her to spray paint in several layers.

"The more I repainted it, the more I didn't think it looked right," she said. She ended up paying a body shop more than $300 to sand the door and repaint it.

Dent repairers keep finding work because there are enough drivers on the road like Demers's neighbor Suzanne Goode, who hired the same person when he was trolling the neighborhood for work. "I don't really care much about aesthetics," she said, so she didn't mind using someone who she figured would not do a perfect job.

But once she was faced with a bumper surface that wasn't smooth and paint that didn't match, she figured she should wise up. "I guess we've decided that we can't keep doing these half-baked jobs on our cars," she said.

Body shop owners say drivers who don't get their dents fixed because they're too busy, don't want to spend the money or just don't care are keeping the dent workers in business. But they say they see no way to stop it.

"This industry has received a lot of black eyes," said Lowe of Laurel Auto Body. "It's really hard to earn people's trust and convince them you're not trying to gouge people. But the right way to do body work is very expensive. You get what you pay for."