Car Was Towed By A Roadside Assistance Call By My Insurance And The Tow Company Is Holding My Car Hostage. What Do I Do?

Location: This is in Colorado

Last Saturday I had to have my car towed because someone vandalized it. I put an insurance claim in and I called for roadside assistance using my insurance app. The tow guy that they sent convinced me to keep my car at their lot for safekeeping over the weekend until I found a place that I would want it to be fixed up at and reassured me that it would cost nothing to me in order to keep it there.

When I got my damage estimate from the insurance and chose a spot to have my car fixed, I called the number that the tow person gave me and it was a bogus number. I could not find this company online and the tow guy stopped answering my messages when I attempted to contact him about this.

I did a little research online, and I found their number in some document that indicates they may not be authorized to operate. But now I’m kind of questioning if I found the right person and this person that I talked to was just some random with a similar business name or . But luckily there was a phone number and I called it. However, this is where it gets really shady and please don’t come down hard on me for doing the wrong thing because this is where it got really weird and I got taken advantage of.

Talking to the guy, he told me oh yeah it’s gonna be a lot of money for our holding fees because you had your car here for a long time and then he mocked me for arguing with him about that and explain explaining to him that this was an insurance tow in his guy told me that they were just keeping my car for a couple days for safekeeping. I also informed him about the bonus number and he wanted to know what it was and he wanted to go back-and-forth about that, but I wouldn’t tell him.

I couldn’t get a hold of my insurance very quickly and so I just paid his fees to have it towed to the place that I wanted it repaired at. I wasn’t thinking about the fact that this guy totally could’ve just been a scammer and probably is and I kind of fell for it in my desperation to get my car out of this situation. So I paid him like 650 bucks. He said he would let me know when he had the car hitched up and ready to go and I never heard back from him. It’s really sketchy that this place has no online presence. I had to find their phone number through a weird document and they only took payment through PayPal Venmo or Zelle.

Additionally, when my insurance lady called me back, I was in the shower and I missed her and I couldn’t get a hold of her again. So now I’m dealing with a situation where this tow company is scamming me or it’s not a real company or there’s something really fishy going on about it. And insurance hasn’t addressed my complaints yet about what they’re doing with my car and with charging me personally for all this stuff.

What the hell do I do? Who do I talk to? How do I get my car back and how do I like? Get insurance to Auntie up and take care of this on my behalf?