On Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, you’ll find nail tech Brandi Melvin at Pin Up Salon in Springfield, Mo. “But the rest of the week, you’ll find me at a little, old, messy, car lot — not selling cars, but repossessing them,” she says. “I’ve had people pull guns on me, had angry folks yell and run after me as I drive away, had nasty notes left on my desk, and even received threatening text messages.”
The car lot — Hilltop Auto in Bolivar, Mo. — is a family business and Melvin has been doing repossessions for three years. “When I grew bored with my previous career as a pharmacy tech, I decided to hop on board at the car lot to help out my folks,” says Melvin, who has had no formal training in the job. “Common sense and a gun have done the trick for me so far. I did take a class to get my CCW, which allows me to conceal my gun.”
New technology has made her job easier. “Until a year ago, I had to track down cars the old-fashioned way — a lot of driving around in areas I thought the car might be sitting. I would use networking sites to look for any clues they may have posted in a status,” she says. “But now we use trackers. All I have to do is look up the car on the Internet, get the location, and bam! When we go to retrieve a car, we always take a car hauler in case the vehicle isn’t running, but most of the time we just take our spare key and drive it back to the lot.”