A Thanksgiving Day update on Broward and Orlando-based Shawn Thompson, whose moving companies have extorted and defrauded customers up, down and beyond the state of Florida:
- A final order by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services fined Thompson $110,000 for 22 state statute violations, including lying about delivery time, “deceptively presenting” an estimate on a move, failing to honor a contract, holding customers’ goods hostage, and other fraudulent acts. Also, the final order said, Thompson “shall cease and desist from operating as an intrastate mover of household goods in the state of Florida” and all future applications for registration will be “refused.”
- An Orange County Civil Court wants Thompson to fill out an information sheet about his personal finances after last December’s $60,150 judgment in a lawsuit filed by Scott Meyer, who was extorted by Thompson’s Moving Giants. Court documents say Thompson avoided being served with the order, partially because people at his home threw rocks at the process server.
- The Third Circuit Court of Appeal upheld the Miami-Dade Circuit Court’s 2003 judgment for $7,619 plus attorneys’ fees and for Nicolette Gonzalez, and an injunction against Thompson, Thompson Nation Holdings and Small Move Movers.
- A Sept. 4 report by Orlando’s WFTV Channel 9 raised the possibility that Thompson, despite none of his companies being licensed to move people within Florida or across state lines, continues to operate by his standard fraud used on Gonzalez and Meyer — adding thousands of dollars to a move’s cost once the movers load the customer’s possessions on the truck, then threatening to keep the customer’s goods at an undisclosed location if they don’t pay the jacked up price.
Thompson demanded the Miami Herald to stop contacting him about the customer lawsuits and state investigations concerning his moving business. That’s not a demand he could make of Florida Department of Agricultural and Consumer Services investigators, and Thompson eventually started ducking them.
Mover on the move
As detailed in two previous Miami Herald stories, almost 100 customer complaints caused the state Department of Agricultural and Consumer Services to launch an investigation into Thompson’s companies. That investigation ended June 9 with a hefty administrative complaint: 69 pages detailing 22 statutory violations, several committed on all but a few of 18 moves investigated, by companies Thompson ran through Thompson Nation Holdings.
The moves followed the same pattern. The customer received a low estimate and, usually, paid a deposit. The movers arrived, loaded the truck, then produced an invoice with a total double, triple or quadruple the estimate. The movers then demanded the customer pay the total, sometimes inflated by line charges for equipment or services that were unnecessary, not provided or supposedly included in the total cost.
The department sent copies of the complaint via certified mail to Thompson Nation Holdings registered state address, 2814 Silver Star Rd., No. 219 in Orlando, and to Thompson’s lawyer, Fort Lauderdale’s Gawane Grant. No one at the Silver Star Road address accepted the complaint or scheduled a U.S. Postal Service delivery. Why became clear when a state investigator went to deliver the complaint by hand on July 8…