“We don’t see a car.” Isabela, who posts on TikTok as @isabeladamian, says that was the moment she and the man she had just had dinner with reached his parking space in downtown Houston. They had been at a restaurant for about an hour and a half. “Is that not where your car is?” she remembers asking. His answer: “Yeah, that’s where it’s supposed to be.”

Her video, posted on August 4, 2026, and titled on screen “Getting our car towed,” is a short account recorded while the two of them waited for a ride to go get the car back. She says two men were standing in the middle of the lot when they walked up. According to her, the men asked whether they had a car that had been towed, and one said, “My boss said that we towed that.” They handed over a card and told the pair to call the number on it.

“There’s a sign out on the street that says self parking,” she says. They took that as permission. “We can park here,” she recalls thinking. Only after the car was gone did they look around. “And then we see the tow sign,” she says.

Then the phone calls started. She says the number on the card “goes straight to voicemail.” So they called the number on what she calls the road sign instead and got a person, who asked which lot they were standing in. In her telling, the answer was, “We get calls about them all the time. We don’t tow them. They have their own company that tows.”

When they hung up and turned around, she says, the two men were no longer there. “We’re standing in the empty parking lot, nobody else is around us, and we have no idea where these two people just went. And nobody’s answering the phone on the number that they gave us on the card.”

They did find the men again and told them nobody was picking up. She says the reply was, “That’s fine. Just go to the address that they sent you.” By her account that address was about 20 minutes away, far enough that they had to order an Uber, and she was uneasy about it: “As long as this is an actual location and not like a sketchy warehouse on the outside of town.”

Her conclusion about the signs is that the city sign saying parking is enforced “doesn’t even enforce parking in this parking lot.” The video ends with the ride still on its way, so it does not show where the car was taken, the bill or the car. Her caption reads, “oopsy.. moments like this make for great stories at least,” and she signs off by saying she is not telling her mom yet.

Her account turns on signs read in the wrong order. The self parking sign on the street is what they saw on the way in. The tow sign is what they saw after the car was gone. On an unfamiliar lot, look for the tow sign before leaving the car, read whose name and number are on it, photograph it, and take one more picture of the car in its space.

If the car is gone when you return, that photo gives you a number to call without depending on a card handed over in the lot. In her account, the number on the road sign reached someone who said they do not tow from that lot, and the number on the card reached nobody. That person also told them the lot has “their own company that tows,” so ask whoever answers for that company’s name.

Before paying for a ride across town, get a person on the phone at the yard. Ask them to confirm the car is there by its plate, and ask for the yard’s name, its hours, the total owed, how it can be paid and what the owner has to bring to get the car released. The car in her story was his, so ask whether the registered owner has to collect it in person. Check that the address you were sent belongs to the company you were told does the towing.

If nobody answers, as she says happened to them, call the police non emergency line, give the plate and ask whether the car has been logged as towed and to which yard.

Keep the record as you go: photos of both signs and the empty space, the card, the call log with times, the ride receipt and an itemized receipt from the yard.