Leasing company billing me for citations they paid without my consent

[GlennS]

Maryland

Hello,
Please excuse lack of brevity - I tend to like being thorough.

I am being greatly wronged by the bank financing my car lease. Hyundai Finance has been attempting to collect $110 from me related to two traffic citation fines/flag fees that they paid without my consent. It turns out these citations never even reached me because they were sent to the wrong address. The agency that issued them, the City of College Park, MD, can't explain where they got the address they were sent to - it's not even a former address of mine, I never so much as lived in that county. They also suggested - albeit in a non-formal way - that I likely could have gotten them dismissed, but that it would be impossible to reverse things so far down the road (the tickets were issued back in 2016).

Blindly paying any fines or fees that comes across their desk without questioning validity and then billing the leasee is a moronic approach to take. I don't even need to look at my lease to know that I did not waive the rights that come with a traffic citation. And I certainly didn't give anyone power of attorney to plead guilty on my behalf, which is what paying the fine equates to - it says so right on the ticket. I even have to question the legality of them doing that.

I am not going to reimburse them for fines/fees that neither one of us might not have had to pay. I'm fairly certain I could have gotten them dismissed (and not just on the basis of the tickets not being sent to the right place), but whether I could have or not isn't the issue - the issue is that I was never given the chance. I'm pretty confident if I could get the details of how irresponsibly this was handled before the eyes of someone (their legal dept, perhaps?) with the proper combination of authority, reasoning skills and scruples, they'd see what a wrong is being done here and fix it, but wading through the bureaucracy to find that dept/person has been excruciating. Sending it to the p.o. box return address on all the correspondence I've been getting would be futile.

I've been advised by friends/family to just pay it, that it's not worth hassle. But the principle here is just too inarguable for me to give in and do that. There's no gray area here as far as I'm concerned - I'm 100% right, they're 100% wrong (and $110 is actually a huge amount of money for me!).

I'm not really expecting representation here, as I highly doubt it would be pro bono. What I am hoping to get is some advice as to how to go about finding that dept/person I described above, so I can at least state my case to someone who matters.

Thanks for your time,

Glenn

 

[adjusterjack]

I don't even need to look at my lease to know that I did not waive the rights that come with a traffic citation

Yeah, you do have to look at your lease. You probably never read it thoroughly and carefully (nobody does) and have no clue what's in it.

 

[FlyingRon]

I can almost guarantee your lease makes you liable for any tolls or parking tickets the vehicle incurs, without any requirement to give you a chance to have leave to protest them. Having spent a lot of time in College Park (and having gotten a few tickets there), I suspect you're protestations you'd get out of them is laughable. In fact, since you didn't find out about them in a timely manner (by the way there's no obligation that the city mail you anything, the ticket itself was the notice), you only had 14 days from the date of citation, that option was long gone by the time HFS paid them.

Even barring a clause in the lease contract, HFS most likely under common law had the authority to pay the tickets in order to protect their interest (they don't want to lose their vehicle because you let it get booted/towed over the violations) and pursue you for the expense.