Is a notorized &quot;Agreement&quot; between buyer and seller binding? Bought a vehicle from a dealer couple of months ago only to have my insurance refusing to insure it due to fraudulent odometer reading. I ran my own history report and sure enough, it was rolled back 150k miles. In the US under Federal odometer law, 49 U.S.C. Chapter 327 (Public Law 103-272), prohibits the disconnection, resetting, or alteration of a motor vehicle's odometer with intent to change the number of miles indicated thereon. The law requires that a written disclosure of the mileage registered on an odometer be provided by the seller to the purchaser on the title to the vehicle when the ownership of a vehicle is transferred. If the odometer mileage is incorrect, the law requires a statement to that effect to be furnished on the title to the buyer. After filing a police report, I went back to the dealer and the owner explains to me when I purchased the vehicle, his &quot;friend&quot; used his dealer plates...What? Now I know something fishy is going on for sure. He tells me he'll take the car back and if it sells in two weeks, he will give me full amount if it doesn't sell in two weeks, he'll give me 90% of what I paid. He put this in writing and I read over what he typed up and I called a notary so at least we had a witness and it was documented. We both signed the paper and I took pictures of the vehicle and left it there. Is the agreement made by the seller binding? This is a refund agreement between Buyer (me) and seller (Dealer) on XXX vehicle on 06-24 (purchase date). The car has been returned to the lot in the same condition sold. A refund of is to be given on or before 08-21. All previous agreement between buyer and seller is considered null and void. Buyer and seller are in mutual agreement&quot; UPDATE: Dealer has honored our signed agreement. I was told car has been sold but without proof of the sale price, I received the $7,000 that was originally guaranteed after two weeks. Whether the odometer has been changed to show correct mileage I cannot say, I was never listed as the owner or did I sign the car title to my name.
Is the agreement made by the seller binding? Yes. You &quot;secured&quot; reimbursement of 90% of what you paid and de facto waived your entitlement to the remaining 10%. Prior to that signing the agreement, you were entitled to be fully reimbursed regardless of how long it takes for the counterparty to sell the car to someone else. Depending on the exact terms of the agreement, the counterparty might have the meritorious argument that your waiver is in exchange for a &quot;timely&quot; (i.e., two week) reimbursement of at least 90% of your payment.
The person getting the item by fraud didn't get any ownership. Therefore when you bought it, you didn't get ownership either. It's still the company's property, and they can do with it what they like (within reason, they wouldn't be allowed to make it blow up in your face). If you sent back the item, good on you, because the item is now with its rightful owner. If you don't like it, you can sue the person who sold the item to you.
Short Answer You are legally entitled to the cost of an adequate replacement (possibly a lightly used previously owned computer) reduced by the amount refunded. This is sometimes called a &quot;benefit of the bargain&quot; measure of the relief to which you are entitled. But as a practical matter, there is no cost effective way of enforcing your legal rights under these facts, that doesn't deeply compromise you chances of success. But, trying to litigate the case on the cheap, because it is unlikely to succeed, makes the effort to enforce your rights even less worthwhile. Your best options are those you could take outside the formal legal process (such as social media gripes, or complaining to &quot;the manager&quot; of the person you dealt with first if they refuse to give you what you want or are entitled to under the law). Long Answer Applicable Law The default rules of law, absent an express contractual term to the contrary, are as follows: In every U.S. jurisdiction in an intra-U.S. transaction, this is governed by the following section of Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code, which apart from section and subsection numbering conventions is substantially identical in all of these jurisdictions. It states: § 2-713. Buyer's Damages for Non-delivery or Repudiation. (1) Subject to the provisions of this Article with respect to proof of market price (Section 2-723), the measure of damages for non-delivery or repudiation by the seller is the difference between the market price at the time when the buyer learned of the breach and the contract price together with any incidental and consequential damages provided in this Article (Section 2-715), but less expenses saved in consequence of the seller's breach. (2)Market price is to be determined as of the place for tender or, in cases of rejection after arrival or revocation of acceptance, as of the place of arrival. In international transactions between signatory countries, the relevant body of law of the Convention on the International Sale of Goods (CISG) (1980). The primary applicable provisions of that Convention (to which the U.S. is a party) are: Article 45 (1) If the seller fails to perform any of his obligations under the contract or this Convention, the buyer may: (a) exercise the rights provided in articles 46 to 52; (b) claim damages as provided in articles 74 to 77. (2) The buyer is not deprived of any right he may have to claim damages by exercising his right to other remedies. (3) No period of grace may be granted to the seller by a court or arbitral tribunal when the buyer resorts to a remedy for breach of contract. Article 46 (1) The buyer may require performance by the seller of his obligations unless the buyer has resorted to a remedy which is inconsistent with this requirement. . . . Article 47 (1) The buyer may fix an additional period of time of reasonable length for performance by the seller of his obligations. (2) Unless the buyer has received notice from the seller that he will not perform within the period so fixed, the buyer may not, during that period, resort to any remedy for breach of contract. However, the buyer is not ­deprived thereby of any right he may have to claim damages for delay in performance. Article 48 (1) Subject to article 49, the seller may, even after the date for delivery, remedy at his own expense any failure to perform his obligations, if he can do so without unreasonable delay and without causing the buyer ­unreasonable inconvenience or uncertainty of reimbursement by the seller of expenses advanced by the buyer. However, the buyer retains any right to claim ­damages as provided for in this Convention. (2) If the seller requests the buyer to make known whether he will accept performance and the buyer does not comply with the request within a reasonable time, the seller may perform within the time indicated in his request. The buyer may not, during that period of time, resort to any remedy which is inconsistent with performance by the seller. (3) A notice by the seller that he will perform within a specified period of time is assumed to include a request, under the preceding paragraph, that the buyer make known his decision. (4) A request or notice by the seller under paragraph (2) or (3) of this article is not effective unless received by the buyer. Article 49 (1) The buyer may declare the contract avoided: (a) if the failure by the seller to perform any of his obligations under the contract or this Convention amounts to a fundamental breach of contract; or (b) in case of non-delivery, if the seller does not deliver the goods within the additional period of time fixed by the buyer in accordance with paragraph (1) of article 47 or declares that he will not deliver within the period so fixed. . . . Article 74 Damages for breach of contract by one party consist of a sum equal to the loss, including loss of profit, suffered by the other party as a consequence of the breach. Such damages may not exceed the loss which the party in breach foresaw or ought to have foreseen at the time of the conclusion of the contract, in the light of the facts and matters of which he then knew or ought to have known, as a possible consequence of the breach of contract. Article 75 If the contract is avoided and if, in a reasonable manner and within a reasonable time after avoidance, the buyer has bought goods in replacement or the seller has resold the goods, the party claiming damages may recover the difference between the contract price and the price in the substitute transaction as well as any further damages recoverable under article 74. Article 76 (1) If the contract is avoided and there is a current price for the goods, the party claiming damages may, if he has not made a purchase or resale under article 75, recover the difference between the price fixed by the ­contract and the current price at the time of avoidance as well as any further damages recoverable under article 74. If, however, the party claiming ­damages has avoided the contract after taking over the goods, the current price at the time of such taking over shall be applied instead of the current price at the time of avoidance. (2) For the purposes of the preceding paragraph, the current price is the price prevailing at the place where delivery of the goods should have been made or, if there is no current price at that place, the price at such other place as serves as a reasonable substitute, making due allowance for differences in the cost of transporting the goods. Article 77 A party who relies on a breach of contract must take such measures as are reasonable in the circumstances to mitigate the loss, including loss of profit, resulting from the breach. If he fails to take such measures, the party in breach may claim a reduction in the damages in the amount by which the loss should have been mitigated. Your Legal Rights This brings us to the question: What buyer protections are there for this? Will I be able to easily sue the manufacturer for monetary losses if the manufacturer refunds me anyway instead of letting me wait for the item to come back in stock? The buyer is legally entitled to the fair market value of obtaining a replacement (perhaps in the secondary market for used laptops) that is equivalent to what was ordered reduced by the amount of money refunded. Practical Vindication Of Your Legal Rights But it is much easier to get the refund than it is to prevail in a lawsuit for the additional damages to which the buyer is legally entitled, a prevailing buyer will probably not get their attorney fees if they prevail, and there is a good chance that the dispute will be sent to arbitration which is, generally speaking (according to strong empirical evidence) a forum with a strong anti-consumer bias (although consumer arbitration can be fairly inexpensive to litigate in, is somewhat more tolerant of lack of legal expertise by a self-represented party, and sometimes despite everything, you win, or can even get an unfair result that works in your favor rather than that of the seller). If you are fighting over $1,500 to $2,500, and you have a fairly complex case to prove that will require expert testimony (and expert witness fees and court costs would be awarded to a prevailing party in addition to the actual damages to which they are legally entitled even though attorney fees are not recoverable in most cases), it will be very hard to find a lawyer willing to take the case. This is because it will take far more than 5-12 hours of attorney work to take the case to its conclusion, which is your maximum cost effective litigation budget, even if everything you win goes to the attorney and you receive no actual benefit. To get even a 50% recovery, your lawyer needs to get the job done ins 2-6 hours depending on your lawyer's hourly rate, which is close to impossible when your legal argument is as difficult to prove as it is in this case. So, basically, the only cost effective way to litigate the case is without a lawyer in small claims court or consumer arbitration, even though representing yourself without a lawyer greatly reduces your chances of success on the merits. On balance, you would usually be better off accepting a refund and acknowledging that you have been damaged in a manner for which the law provides no reliable and cost effective remedy, because the harm is too small. Bad mouthing the offending company on social media (which sometimes results in a PR driven instead of lawyer driven, favorable resolution) would probably be a more fruitful strategy. Complaining to a manager or writing a letter to the President of the company might also be a more fruitful strategy. Sometimes small disputes can be resolved with class action lawsuits, but this isn't a case where this is an option, since it involves just a single individual or a handful of individuals who are harmed. This is also not the sort of case where a state consumer protection agency or attorney general's office or federal consumer protection agency is likely to get involved, since it doesn't involve a systemic deceptive trade practice, just an unfair to you bad situation. Why have these laws if they are so hard to enforce in consumer cases? As my commercial transactions professor in law school (James J. White, the author of the leading legal treatise on the subject) was fond of saying: all legal issues become more interesting if you add more zeros to the amount in controversy. If the computer system you bought had a price of $150,000 that had since gone up to $300,000, this dispute would absolutely be worth litigating. Furthermore, since you could litigate it adequately on the litigation budget that this amount in controversy would make possible, your prospects of successfully vindicating your rights as a buyer, at only a modest discount for unrecoverable litigation costs, would be much greater. Essentially, our system is designed to get close to justice in the most important disputes, as measured by the amount in controversy, while it tolerates small injustices that are not as damaging (in raw absolute dollar terms) as big disputes. This is unfair, but the source of this unfairness is intrinsic to the nature of the problem (rather than simply being a matter of artificial bias created by the people who designed the civil justice system). Also, this unfair bias comes close to maximizing the aggregate improvement in economic value that the legal system as a whole can provide for a given legal of expenditure on this system. Basically, at a fundamental economic level, the economic costs of justly resolving small wrongs can be greater due to the deadweight loss of litigation expenses for the economy as a whole, than the economic benefits of resolving the wrongs fairly (which provides not only justice to those involved but also provides an incentive to act justly in future transactions before one knows whether a problem or dispute will arise).
Maybe You linked to the publication of a patent application, not to a patent. Based solely on looking at the format of the number the answer would be, Yes, unless it eventually became an issued patent. As it happens, it did become issued patent US9066511B2. That would make the answer no. Since the application was filed before you started selling them, the fact that you were selling them in 2017 could not be used to challenge the patent. I say the answer is maybe because the patent has been disputed in court and I do not know if the outcome has left the patent valid. You can look this up at the USPTO Public PAIR. Then you need to search with either the patent number or the publication number. When you get to the record of the history of that application look at the Image File Wrapper tab.
Is odometer fraud a felony or a misdemeanor? It's both: a felony under federal law, and a misdemeanor under Colorado law. There's no conflict; each of those sovereigns can enforce its laws independently. Someone who tampers with an odometer could be prosecuted in federal court, and convicted of a felony; or prosecuted in Colorado court, and convicted of a misdemeanor; or even both. In practice, it sounds like the federal authorities are most interested in prosecuting large-scale odometer fraud schemes, and would generally leave one-off cases to the state authorities. Are there exceptions where this may not be enforceable? This site (https://www.nhtsa.gov/equipment/odometer-fraud) indicates that the requirement for a written disclosure of odometer roll-back is not applicable for vehicles over 20 years old (also pre-2010 models, which seems a bit more restrictive). I'm having a hard time nailing this particular restriction down in the Colorado Statutes. Can anyone point out where this law is defined? As far as I can tell, Colorado law simply incorporates the federal requirement: CRS 42-6-202 (5): It is unlawful for any transferor to fail to comply with 49 U.S.C. sec. 32705 and any rule concerning odometer disclosure requirements or to knowingly give a false statement to a transferee in making any disclosure required by such law. 49 USC 32705 (a)(5) permits the Secretary of Transportation (i.e. the federal Department of Transportation) to make regulations that carve out exemptions from the mileage disclosure rules, which can be found at 49 CFR 580.17 and include the 20-year and 2010 rules. So these same exemptions apply to the state requirement. (Incidentally, the Colorado title forms do not mention this exemption.) Note, however, that this is only an exemption from the disclosure requirement. There is no exemption from the general law against odometer fraud. It is illegal to tamper with an odometer no matter how old the car is. What is the statute of limitations to pursue crimes of odometer fraud? I think this is answered in Colorado Statute 13-80-102(j) (https://leg.colorado.gov/sites/default/files/images/olls/crs2020-title-13.pdf). This seems to indicate this type of fraud has a 2-year timeline. Does this apply from date of purchase or date of discovery? 13-80-102 is a statute of limitations for civil actions, and it does indeed cover actions for odometer fraud (see (1)(j) which references CRS 42-6-204). This would apply if the buyer wanted to sue the seller in civil court. But that's unrelated to the criminal statues we discussed above, which would be prosecuted in criminal court by the state or federal government. The limit is two years &quot;after the cause of action accrues&quot;, which is defined in 13-80-108(3): A cause of action for fraud, misrepresentation, concealment, or deceit shall be considered to accrue on the date such fraud, misrepresentation, concealment, or deceit is discovered or should have been discovered by the exercise of reasonable diligence. For criminal prosecutions, the Colorado statute of limitations for misdemeanors is generally 18 months, from the time the offense was committed (CRS 16-5-401). For some crimes, it is defined to start instead when the offense was discovered, but odometer fraud doesn't appear to be one of them; still, it could conceivably be prosecuted under other fraud statutes. As for federal law, the statute of limitations is generally 5 years from commission (18 USC 3282).
Two people can have an equal interest in real property without being married, and being incarcerated doesn't affect a person's property rights. What matters is that now your ex-wife has a legal interest in the property. As a separate issue, she presumably also has a legal obligation w.r.t. the mortgage (otherwise the quitclaim deed makes no sense). The easiest solution is for the other party to voluntarily transfer their interest in the property to you via a quitclaim deed. A difficult solution is to use the judicial process to remove a person from the title. This could be done if there was fraud involved in the property transfer process, for example if the quitclaim deed was forged (presumably not the case here). You might sue to correct an error which doesn't reflect the terms of the transaction, via a reformation action, but that doesn't seem to be the case (a party not understanding the consequences of transferring an interest isn't an error in the relevant sense). You need to hire an attorney to solve the problem (he will look at all of the documentation relevant for your case for a possible solution).
Ah, the old &quot;is this contract invalid (but still legally binding for the other party)&quot;? You signed a contract with someone else. You do not dispute that it was you who signed the contract and agreed to it. You made it abundantly clear that there was a contract between you when you allowed him to do the work. This means one of the following was true: There was a mistake in the contract. What was followed was how it was intended. You signed a contract containing false information in an attempt to defraud someone. One of these will end up much worse for you. The fact that the work was not completed to the agreed upon standard could be considered a breach of contract- this is something a small claims court would decide.
No, not for 1+ years See section 47 of the Motor Vehicle Act 1988: (1) When a motor vehicle registered in one State has been kept in another State, for a period exceeding twelve months, the owner of the vehicle shall, within such period and in such form containing such particulars as may be prescribed by the Central Government, apply to the registering authority, within whose jurisdiction the vehicle then is, for the assignment of a new registration mark and shall present the certificate of registration to that registering authority: [...] Related: 1 2