“Today I was cheated, swindled, conned at my local Whole Foods.” That is how Erin Iveson, who posts on TikTok as @eriniveson, opens a seven minute video posted on August 17, 2026. By her account, she sent $300 by payment app to a man who flagged her down in the parking lot and offered to repair a dent on the spot, and when she finally looked at the panel it was in worse shape than when he started.

She says she was pulling into the lot at Flower Hill in Del Mar, in San Diego, with her window down when a man in “a beat up old truck” rolled his own window down and waved at her. He told her he did mobile body work and had seen “a huge dent and a scratch” on the side of her car. She offered to take a card. According to Iveson, he answered, “No, I have everything on me right now. Let me park, I’ll come over to you.”

Iveson says she had hit the cage on the front of a friend’s truck not long before. She also says her car is “currently in lemon law” because “it slams on the brakes randomly, and then it locks the ABS, and then I have to push on the gas to unlock it.” That, she says, is how she ended up in the cage. She wanted the dent fixed, even though she expects to turn the car in soon.

His pitch, as she repeats it, was “no deductible, no going through insurance,” about 15 minutes of work and a price of $300. He added a guarantee: “If it doesn’t look like the other side of your car by the time I’m done, you don’t pay a thing.” Iveson says her first thought was “this sounds too good to be true.” She agreed anyway.

He fetched tools from his truck, stuck a suction cup on the panel and started yanking. Then he asked her to get in the car and hold the brakes. From the seat she heard a pop and took it to mean the dent was out. While he worked, the owner of a Porsche parked beside her came back. Iveson says the woman gave her a look that asked whether she needed help, and she laughed and said she was good.

Then he brought out a mallet. He had her turn the steering wheel all the way to the right, then all the way to the left, while he hammered. “My entire car is shaking,” she says. When she rolled the window down to ask if everything was all right, he told her, “All good, mamas,” said it was a rubber mallet and hit his own arm with it to show it would not damage the car.

He shouted across the lot for his wife, who came over to take payment. Iveson says the woman asked for her phone number and listed what they accept: “Cash App, Zelle, Venmo, Apple Cash.” When Iveson said she was from Kansas, she says, the woman insisted Kansas has “different money” until her husband, still hammering, told her she was thinking of Canada. The couple also told her it was their daughter’s fifth birthday and that the day’s jobs were paying for an Elsa and Bluey cake. The wife then called out that another driver across the lot wanted body work too.

Iveson sent the $300 without leaving her seat. The man asked twice for a tip and told her he was putting wax on the panel that had to sit for 24 hours before she wiped it off. “I don’t even get out of the car to look at it before I sent the money,” she says.

The video shows a photo she says she took right after the original collision, the lower side of a light colored SUV beside one wheel. It then cuts to the panel as it is now, filmed up close: a long horizontal scrape runs across the paint into the edge of the wheel arch, with pale residue smeared along it. “That’s worse than what it was before,” she says. She does not say in the video whether she has asked for the money back.

Her closing line: “So I got swindled out of $300. But hopefully I was able to get a five year old a Bluey Elsa birthday cake.”

For a driver flagged down the same way, the first place to stop it is the card. She asked for one and was told he had everything with him and would start now. A repairer with no card, no business name and no photos of finished jobs gives you nothing to check before he touches the car and nobody to call afterward.

The second is where she was sitting. Holding the brakes and turning the wheel kept her inside the car for the whole job, and a pop heard from the driver’s seat is not a dent seen gone. Stand outside, watch the panel and photograph it before any tool goes on. Iveson’s photo from the day of the collision is the only reason she can show a comparison now.

The third is the guarantee, which was his own test: the repaired side matches the other side or the job is free. Before paying, walk around the car and compare both sides. If wax is covering the repair, ask for it to be wiped off first, because a coating that has to stay on for 24 hours hides the result at the one moment you can still refuse to pay.

If you have already paid, save the payment receipt, the phone number the money went to, the time and the exact spot in the lot, and take close photos of the panel the same day. If the car is in a lemon law claim and due to be handed back, as hers is, ask whoever is handling the claim before letting anyone work on the body.