An auto body repair operation that uses deception and intimidation to take your cash is the target of an exclusive KIRO Team 7 Investigation.

Investigative Reporter Chris Halsne recently turned the tables on these shoddy repairmen who have been ruining cars all over the Seattle area this summer.

Victim after victim has been telling KIRO-TV the same story:

Their vehicle has a dent or scrape.

They pull into a gas station to fill up with fuel.

A man or pair of men approach with a sales pitch.

They say they are new to town or just starting their own auto body repair business.

They promise to fix the dent right there or follow you to your home.

It’s a cash-only transaction.

Using a series of hidden cameras, KIRO Team 7 Investigators took them up on that offer last week.

For the first time all summer, this fly-by-night, illegitimate dent-fixer and his band of relatives didn't have an easy victim.

While they hammered and sprayed, pretending to fix the ding in our car, we videotaped. After only eight minutes, the hustle (done in this public parking lot) ended. Even though the dent was worse than when he started, this guy, who called himself Randy, wanted money right away. Team 7 Investigators had something else for him, lots of questions.

Investigative Reporter Chris Halsne asked “Randy,” “You go up to people at gas stations and try to do on-site dent repair?”

Randy at first said, “No,” but immediately changed his tune saying. “I mean sometimes I do. I gotta pay the bills. Gotta make a living. I’m not killing nobody man.”

Halsne told him, “That really looks like crap.”

Randy responded by telling Halsne, “You gave me a hundred dollars. Take it to a body shop. There’s a thousand dollars in damage there.”

Secretly watching Randy during our sting was Mike West, a current board member of the Washington Auto Body Craftsman Association. West says, "We’ve basically rearranged the dent. Where we had one dent, now we got about a hundred. We’ve complicated the repair.”

Our undercover operation started months ago when Christian Posse called for our help. He fell for a smooth sales pitch while he was filling up his dented Suburban with fuel at a Ballard station. Posse says the pitch is “very appealing. It’s very cheap. We started talking about a price of about 300 to 400 dollars, which sounded pretty darn good.”

A guy we know as "Joey" and another man followed Posse home promising to make a 10-inch dent as good as new. Posse says “they started by essentially making hole and using hammers to kind of push that part out then they put some kind of paste on it that dried.” Posse says the pair promised they'd "be back later to finish" and demanded cash for a job not done.

DENT REPAIR INFO Seattle Police phone number to file on-site dent repair complaints: (206) 625-5011 Washington Attorney General's Office Paintless dent removal limitations

Posses says, “They became more, I’d say begging, which started to make me suspicious. Like they said we have a family and kids and we need to feed them.”

Christians wife thought the whole deal looked weird, so she snapped photos from her kitchen window just before they disappeared.

With just these photos to go on, and no idea of who they really were, KIRO Team 7 Investigators started doing surveillance at North Seattle-area gas stations.

In the meantime, we also destroyed a perfectly good back fender with a hammer and a forklift so we could tempt the roaming, unlicensed on-site body repair outfit.

We soon captured hidden video of "Joey" and "Frank," tricking a college kid into fixing up his dad's BMW. Afterwards, the victim was too scared of retaliation to talk to us on camera, but says the pair took his cash and didn't fix his car.

That's no surprise to Viktor Humeniuk of Fluery's Autobody. “It’s the intimidation. They get the money from you, do a job, and walk away.”

Humeniuk has seen at least two vehicles every week this summer come to his shop to be redone. A signature speckled black and grey primer and peeling putty mark the roving group of dent fixers work.

Humeniuk says “They don’t even use plastic to repair it. They use plaster of Paris. It’s a water soluble repair.”

Steve Ford teaches auto body repair to South Seattle Community College students. He says sloppy repair work like this actually costs consumers more, then if they'd done nothing. “When they come back after they’ve had this repair, some I really couldn’t repair. Others, It was double the price to fix it correctly.”

It turns out that Joey and Frank and Randy are all related. They are not, however, the only ones involved in unlicensed on site dent repair. And if there is any advice we can give to avoid them all “Randy” himself said it best. “Take it to a body shop”

The Seattle Police fraud division have opened a criminal investigation based on our findings. Detectives suspect more victims of schemes like this are out there. They are asking that these victims give them a call a file a complaint.

You can call police directly at (206) 625-5011 or e-mail KIRO Team 7 Investigators and we'll pass along the compliant.