All Mark Oberholtzer wanted to do was upgrade his ride. What he got instead was a world of trouble from half a world away.

In 2015, Mark Oberholtzer , a plumbing company owner sued a Ford dealership for more than $1 million in financial losses and damages to his company’s reputation after a pickup truck he once owned ended up with Islamic militants fighting in Syria’s civil war.

A photo of his truck, with his Mark-1 Plumbing decals still attached went viral, leading to thousands of harassing phone calls.


How the truck ended up in the hands of Isis

In October 2013, Oberholtzer took his truck to AutoNation Ford Gulf Freeway in Houston for a trade-in, He got a 2012 Ford F-250 and said goodbye to his old truck.

Before he left , he started to peel off the company’s decals from the truck’s doors but a salesman stopped him. The man told Oberholtzer that peeling off the decal would damage the paint on the truck and he told him that they would remove the decals before the truck was resold.

The truck was auctioned off in November 2013. The next month, it was shipped from Houston to Mersin, Turkey.
About a year later, the truck popped up in a tweet posted by Caleb Weiss, a contributor to the Long War Journal. It showed militants firing a heavy weapon from the bed of a truck with the Mark-1 company name on the front door.

Threats and losses

The photo went viral, was picked up by news outlets and led to thousands of phone calls to Oberholtzer’s business and personal phones.

Most of the calls were harassing and threatened violence and included the “yelling (of) expletives at whomever answered the phone,” the “singing in Arabic for the duration of the phone call” and “threats of injury or death” made against Oberholtzer’s family and employees.

Oberholtzer had to temporarily shut down his business and leave town, according to the lawsuit, resulting in financial losses. He’s also had visits from Homeland Security and the FBI.

And he still had to deal with phone calls, which continue to come in a year after the photo first appeared.

Lawsuit

“He was tired of being called an ISIS supporter and a terrorist supporter,” his attorney, Craig Eiland, told U.S. News when the lawsuit was filed, using an acronym to refer to the Islamic State group. “One person called his secretary an 'ISIS wh*re' – that was today."
The settlement was filed quietly and approved by a judge in October, as the U.S. presidential election reached a dramatic end.

According to a 2017 update by USNEWS, the lawsuit was settled.

Remarkably, Mark-1 Plumbing never changed its phone number. The line was answered by a voicemail message Monday.

Sources:
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/14/us/terror-truck-lawsuit/index.html
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2017-01-09/plumber-whose-decaled-truck-went-to-syria-settles-lawsuit

No such thing as bad publicity right ? lalasticlala