In the wee hours of Thursday, May 11, small fleet owner and the admin of the popular USA_Transportation Instagram page Bogdan Kruzhinskiy was celebrating his 30th birthday and a friend's recent graduation when, unbeknownst to them, their friend's 2015 Volvo was being towed from a nearby truck stop.
The stop in question, the BP station at 426 Westinghouse Boulevard in Charlotte, North Carolina, had contacted Ingram's Towing and Recovery, who later presented Kruzhinskiy and his friend with a $6,000 bill for the tow and impound. That's $3,000 for the tractor, and $3,000 for the trailer.
Kruzhinskiy said they checked the Volvo's electronic logging device to find it had been driven just seven tenths of a mile, and that Ingram's used a tool to unlock and start the truck without their knowledge.
When morning came, and Kruzhinskiy and company noticed the truck was gone, they spent all day pleading with Ingram's to lower the price, or at least to accept something besides cash. Kruzhinskiy filmed the encounter in what's now become a notorious, viral video viewed hundreds of thousands of times on various channels.
[Related: More towing horror stories: $7,000 for a cross-town haul]
Kruzhinskiy admits his friend was in the wrong. The BP maintains it had clear signage indicating that trucks must pay $15 to park overnight. Kruzhinskiy said the signage had been obscured when his friend parked, but nobody in this story seems very sympathetic to that.
"When I saw the sign that said $2,000 and up for tractors and trailers, my heart sank," Kruzhinskiy told Overdrive. "$2,000 is already a lot."