I have been on either good behavior or with this interlock dual reporting to two states for three and a half years now. I’ve been sober for that period of time. I am FINALLY free. No more avoiding drive-thrus, getting stuck at work because it’s too hot, violations that weren’t my fault, fighting with the DMV’s, hiring a lawyer twice to argue with Massachusetts corrupt RMV, thousands of dollars in total, distracted driving, explaining to new friends what it is, I AM FREE FROM THE GOVERNMENT. I feel like Ron Swanson. My car is so peaceful. YAAAAYYY. The only thing I don’t understand is that my lease is expiring and I paid the last payment but it’s still not closed. WHO CARES BYEEEE INTOXALOCK

Intoxalock has an A-minus BBB rating and a 1.01-star customer score. Both numbers are real. They measure completely different things.

I just published Part 25 of my ongoing investigation into Intoxalock.

Here is the thing most people do not know about the BBB. The letter grade and the customer star rating are two entirely separate systems that do not talk to each other.

The letter grade — A-minus — measures whether the company responds to formal complaints within a time window. If they respond, the grade is protected. It does not measure whether the problem was actually solved.

The customer review score — 1.01 out of 5 stars, average of 267 reviews — measures what real drivers actually think. Intoxalock has no requirement to respond to those at all. So they don't.

959 formal complaints filed in the last three years. The BBB file still lists Kimberly Williams as CEO. She left in December 2021. The actual CEO — Kathy Boden Holland, who has been running the company through every crisis documented in this series — does not appear on the file anywhere.

All of it is documented by screenshot, captured today.

Full post with every source linked:

https://intoxalockedout.substack.com/p/inside-intoxalocks-101-star-a-minus

Consumer Advocacy & Research

IntoxaLockedOut.Substack.com

PART 14

The Contract You Never Saw,

Couldn't Read, and Never Signed —

But Are Legally Bound By Anyway

How Intoxalock hides a six-page lease until your car is already compromised — and what the law might have to say about it.

"Sales people are NOT required to have signed contracts prior to the installation of the system and leave all the 'education' to the customer service team. In addition, NONE of the customers sign or even SEE a contract until they cannot get a work order for a recalibration or question a charge on their credit card. That's a debacle because the customer service person has to inform them a contract needs to be signed prior to providing the work order. Usually the customer has been on hold for at least 30 minutes to an hour (I worked when hold times were upwards to 3 hours) and then we have to walk them through how to esign on the app while they are standing at a service center trying to get the recalibration."

— Intoxalock Operations Personnel | Whistleblower Disclosure #20 | SimplyHired | Pre-June 2026 (exact posting date not publicly visible on platform)

Read that again. Slowly.

To independently confirm what this whistleblower described, I called Intoxalock posing as a new customer. I have this call saved as a recording. I asked the agent whether I could see a copy of the contract before installation. She told me she was looking it up on her computer. She then informed me that in New York State it is forbidden for anyone to see the contract prior to installation. There is no such law. No such prohibition exists anywhere in New York State law or regulation. What she described as a legal requirement imposed by the State of New York is in fact a corporate policy of Intoxalock — and attributing that policy to state authority is itself a deceptive act.

That is not a disgruntled employee venting online. That is an operations insider describing — in precise, operational detail — the exact mechanism by which this company withholds its own contract from every customer it enrolls. Not sometimes. Not accidentally. Every time. By design.

The work order is the document you need to get your device recalibrated. In New York State you are legally required to calibrate your device within 30 days. Intoxalock knows this. And Intoxalock will not release that work order until you sign a contract — a contract you are reading for the very first time while standing in a garage, on your cell phone, after waiting on hold for up to three hours, with a device already hard-wired into your car that you cannot legally drive without.

The work order is the hostage. The contract is the ransom note.

One might ask: whether withholding a court-mandated service document until a consumer signs a contract they have never seen — while standing in a garage after hours on hold — might raise serious questions under laws governing economic duress, contract formation, and consumer fraud.

I am not a lawyer. I will leave that to those who are.

What Happened To Me

I want to tell you my own story. Because I lived every single step of it. And because it is important that you understand — what happened to me was not a glitch. It was not a bad day. It was the system working exactly as it was designed to work.

I am a retired Purchasing Director. I spent fifteen years in the hospitality industry managing vendor relationships at a professional level. Over that career I dealt with well over a thousand vendors — contracts, negotiations, pricing disputes, compliance requirements, deliverables. I know what a legitimate business relationship looks like. I know what a vendor is supposed to do when a customer has a problem.

In fifteen years managing over a thousand vendor relationships, I never once encountered anything remotely like what I am about to describe. Not even close.

The Sales Call — 'There Is No Contract'

Before my son's installation I called Intoxalock. I spoke with a salesperson — I will call her Locke. I asked a lot of questions. I wrote them down. I asked specifically about a contract. She told me there was no contract. No lease. No commitment beyond month-to-month.

She quoted me a price for installation. She set up the appointment. She took a payment of twenty-nine dollars from my credit card.

I want to be very precise about that twenty-nine dollars. I authorized twenty-nine dollars. Once. That was the full extent of my authorization. That credit card number was then placed into a contract I had never seen, had been told did not exist, and that my son would ultimately never sign. It would be billed again — without any additional authorization — in the weeks that followed.

One might ask: whether capturing a credit card number during a sales call and then using it for recurring charges under a contract the consumer has never seen might constitute a violation of the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1693e(a) and Regulation E, 12 CFR § 1005.10(b), both of which require separately signed written authorization for recurring electronic charges.

I am not a lawyer. I will leave that to those who are.

The Installation — A Different Price

When I arrived at the shop for the installation I was told the price was approximately one hundred dollars higher than what Locke had quoted me on the phone.

I called Locke to fix it. I could not reach her.

The moment I became a customer — the moment that twenty-nine dollar payment cleared — Intoxalock's phone system had already routed my number away from the domestic sales line and into the offshore India queue. The same queue documented in Post 13 of this series. My calls no longer reached Locke. They reached India.

The internet is full of customers documenting this exact experience — the exact same routing, the exact same moment, the exact same wall. One person needing a workaround to reach their own salesperson is a bad day. Thousands of people describing it identically is architecture.

I needed to reach Locke. So I borrowed my son's phone and dialed her extension directly. It worked — because his number had not yet been flagged by the system as a customer. She answered. I explained the pricing discrepancy. She said she would fix it.

She also told me something I was not expecting.

"This is the first time I have ever spoken to a customer after the initial transaction."

— Locke, Intoxalock Sales Representative | Recorded call | February 2026

She was not surprised that I had a problem. She was surprised that I had found a way back to her at all. The system was designed to ensure she would never have to speak to a customer again after securing the credit card number.

She sent the corrected purchase order to the shop. I went back to pick up the car.

The shop told me they had not received it.

I called Locke again. Both my phone and my son's phone were now blocked. The system had logged both numbers the moment they were used to call her. I had to borrow a third cell phone to reach her.

I needed three phones to reach my own salesperson while standing in a parking lot trying to pick up my son's car. Three phones.

She finally sent the revised purchase order. The process had taken four to five hours from start to finish. And when I received the final tally — it was still approximately twenty dollars higher than my original quote. I had run out of phones to borrow. They got their twenty dollars.

What kind of company's first act after capturing a new customer's credit card is to make that customer permanently unreachable to the person who sold them?

In fifteen years as a Purchasing Director I never once saw anything like it. I could not have imagined it.

The Contract — Five Days Later, On a Phone Screen, In Unreadable Print

About five days after the installation I noticed an unread message on my son's phone. I opened it. It was a DocuSign link — sent at 12:50 PM on the day of the installation, while we were still at the shop. This was just minutes after the device was installed.

The contract had been sitting there, unread, for five days.

The device was already bolted into the car. The compliance clock was already running. And the governing contract had been delivered by text message to a cell phone — and gone completely unnoticed for five days.

I read it. The entire thing. All six pages. Using very strong reading glasses. I believe I am in a very small minority of Intoxalock customers who have ever done that — because by the time that DocuSign link arrives, the device is already in your car, the calibration deadline is already ticking, and reading six pages of fine print on a cell phone screen is genuinely, physically difficult.

NY CPLR § 4544:  New York law requires consumer contracts to be printed in a minimum readable type size. A six-page lease rendered in a mobile browser on a four-inch phone screen does not meet that standard.

And here is the detail that matters most: Intoxalock already had the email address. It appears on page one of the lease itself. They had it. They chose text message anyway.

Email creates a permanent, printable, readable record — one the consumer can review at leisure on a full screen, save, forward to a lawyer, or print before signing. A DocuSign link delivered by text message to a cell phone creates pressure to tap and sign immediately. Intoxalock had the email address. Intoxalock chose the text message. That choice was not an accident.

What I found inside that contract bore no resemblance to what Locke had described on the phone.

There was, in fact, a lease. A six-page document bearing version number Ver 1992.5 — confirming a long-established fee architecture. There was an $81.56 lockout reset fee. A $65.24 administrative closing fee. A $40.00 no-show fee. A $3.26 data processing fee at every calibration. A $3,000 lost device charge. A mandatory arbitration clause. A class action waiver. A jury trial waiver. And a $100 total liability cap — meaning no matter what this company does to you, their maximum legal exposure is one hundred dollars.

None of these had been mentioned on any of my recorded calls with Locke.

Not one.

The Conversation She Will Never Forget

I called Locke again. *67, then her extension. She answered.

I told her I had read the contract. I reminded her she had told me there was no contract. She agreed — again — that she had told me that. I then began going through the fees line by line with her.

What happened next I did not expect.

I genuinely believe she was learning about these fees for the first time. She kept insisting there were no fees — not defensively, but confusedly — the way someone responds when confronted with information that contradicts what they have been taught to believe.

I think Intoxalock keeps its new salespeople deliberately in the dark about the contract terms so they can make representations they believe to be accurate. The deception has layers. The salesperson is not lying — she has simply never been shown the document she is implicitly representing. Her genuine ignorance insulates the company. The shield protects the company from the salesperson. The salesperson's ignorance protects the company from accountability.

My logo is a shield. For exactly this reason.

At the end of that conversation I asked her a question.

"Does it bother you, as a human being, that you are committing fraud all day long?"

— David Lazarus | Recorded call | February 2026

The silence was deafening.

Then she told me I needed to call customer service.

Customer service is India.

The Legal Architecture of What Just Happened

I am not an attorney. Nothing that follows is legal advice. But I can tell you what the law says — and one might ask a qualified attorney whether Intoxalock's contract formation process survives contact with it.

Because here is what I see when I read these statutes. I see five independent legal theories — any one of which, standing alone, might be enough to void this contract entirely. Intoxalock appears to have all five working against them simultaneously.

1. There May Be No Valid Contract At All

For a contract to exist, both parties must knowingly agree to the same terms. This is called mutual assent — a meeting of the minds. Under the foundational case Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp., a consumer's digital signature does not communicate legal assent to terms that were actively concealed from them.

Whistleblower Disclosure #20 — from an Intoxalock operations employee on SimplyHired — confirms that concealment is not incidental. It is operational policy. NONE of the customers sign or even SEE a contract until they cannot get a work order.

NY UCC § 2-A-204:  Under New York lease law, mutual assent is required for contract formation. A consumer cannot legally accept terms they are prevented from seeing. Because Intoxalock explicitly structures its relationship as a device lease, Article 2-A governs — not Article 2.

One might ask: whether a contract that was deliberately withheld from the consumer until after installation — and then delivered in unreadable format to a cell phone — was ever validly formed in the first place.

I am not a lawyer. I will leave that to those who are.

2. Fraud in the Factum — The Verbal Promise Is the Exact Opposite of the Written Terms

The verbal pitch — no lease, no contract, month-to-month — is not merely inconsistent with the written document. It is the precise opposite of what that document says. That is not a misunderstanding between parties. That is fraud going to the very character of the document itself.

In law this is called fraud in the factum. It renders an agreement void ab initio — void from the very beginning, as if it never existed.

3. Economic Duress

The dashboard was disassembled. The device was hard-wired into the ignition. The car was physically inoperable without it. The court-ordered compliance deadline was running. Then the DocuSign arrived.

Austin Instrument, Inc. v. Loral Corp.:  A contract is voidable when a party's assent is induced by an improper threat that leaves no reasonable alternative. A consumer standing in a garage, car already compromised, facing a judicial deadline, told to sign now — is a textbook economic duress scenario.

One might ask: whether obtaining a contract signature from a consumer whose vehicle has just been physically altered, who cannot legally drive without the device, who faces a court deadline, and who is being pressured to sign immediately in a service bay — might constitute economic duress sufficient to void the agreement.

I am not a lawyer. I will leave that to those who are.

4. The E-SIGN Act Does Not Save Them

I am not a lawyer — but it seems to me that Intoxalock may argue that a DocuSign link constitutes a valid electronic signature under the federal E-SIGN Act. One might ask a qualified attorney whether that argument holds up.

I am not a lawyer. I will leave that to those who are. But it appears to fail for a specific and precise legal reason.

The E-SIGN Act validates the mechanism of electronic signatures. It explicitly preserves all standard contract defenses. It says nothing — nothing — about whether the underlying contract was obtained through fraud, duress, or deliberate concealment. A coerced blind signature on an unreadable cell phone screen is still coerced. Still blind. Still unreadable. The technology does not launder the fraud.

5. The Arbitration Clause Collapses With the Contract

When Intoxalock's lawyers invoke the arbitration clause — and they will — one might ask a qualified attorney to respond with a very simple question:

Which contract?

The arbitration clause lives inside the contract. If the contract is void, the arbitration clause is void with it. You cannot enforce a clause from a document that legally does not exist.

Furthermore: the 21-day opt-out window begins running at installation — before the consumer has seen the contract. A deadline to opt out of a clause in a document the consumer was programmatically prevented from seeing cannot legally bind that consumer. The clock cannot run on a document no one has been allowed to read.

And then there is this. My son never signed it. The signature line on the Master Lease Agreement, Ver 1992.5, dated February 18, 2026, is completely blank where the consumer's name should appear. The CFO of Consumer Safety Technology, LLC — Sonya Evanosky — signed it. My son did not. Intoxalock billed, operated, and asserted contractual rights as though a fully executed, mutually agreed-upon contract existed.

One might ask: what it means under contract law when a company enforces the terms of a document that only one party has signed — and when the other party was never shown the document before the device was installed in their vehicle.

I am not a lawyer. I will leave that to those who are.

6. If the Contract Is Void — Everything Inside It Falls

The consequences of a void contract cascade in one direction:

Arbitration clause:  Gone.

Class action waiver:  Gone.
Jury trial waiver:  Gone.
$100 liability cap:  Gone.
21-day opt-out window:  Never legally started.

EFTA payment authorization:  Never validly obtained.

Every charge they have collected. Every violation they have reported to courts. Every penalty they have assessed. All of it resting on a document that — one might ask a qualified attorney — may not legally exist.

The Curry Case — And Why It Matters Here

On March 14, 2026 — less than thirty days after my son's installation — Intoxalock's backend systems were disabled by a cyberattack. The company went dark for eight days. Consumers were stranded. Devices locked out. Phones went unanswered.

Derrick Curry of Worth, Illinois missed work because his device failed during the blackout. He was fired from his job. He filed a class action lawsuit — Curry v. Consumer Safety Technology LLC, case 4:26-cv-00134 — in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa on March 26, 2026, one of at least three related federal class actions filed against Consumer Safety Technology LLC in that court in March 2026. I do not have a subscription to PACER at this writing, but based on publicly available information this litigation appears to be actively proceeding.

Intoxalock's lawyers will almost certainly invoke the arbitration clause to attempt to kill or limit that case. Every consumer in that class signed the same contract — delivered the same way, under the same circumstances, with the same missing signatures and hidden terms.

One might ask: whether a class of consumers who never saw the contract before installation, received it on a cell phone in unreadable type after the device was hard-wired into their vehicles, and in many cases never signed it at all — can be compelled into individual arbitration under a clause extracted through that process.

I am not a lawyer. I will leave that to those who are.

The courts are watching. The legal landscape on arbitration clauses obtained through deception is actively shifting. Qualified attorneys in the Curry case will be asking these exact questions. I will be watching carefully.

One Last Thing

The internet is full of customers describing the exact same experience I just described. The same routing to India the moment they became customers. The same price discrepancy at installation. The same unread DocuSign arriving after the fact. The same wall when they tried to fight back.

They are not making it up. I lived it. And I had fifteen years of professional experience telling me exactly how far outside the bounds of normal business conduct every single step of it was.

What happened to my son did not happen because of a glitch. It did not happen because of a bad employee. It happened because of a design. A design that has been running for years, across 46 states, on an estimated 150,000 people annually — people who cannot say no, cannot walk away, and cannot fight back without someone finally deciding to pay attention.

I am paying attention.

And now, so are you.

intoxalockedout  (v., adj.)

To be legally trapped — financially, physically, and procedurally — by a court-ordered product or service from which there is no exit, no recourse, and no one who will answer the phone.

"She read every page of the six-page lease on her phone — all the way down to the $100 liability cap, the mandatory arbitration clause, and the jury trial waiver — and then looked up to find that the mechanic had already driven her car around back. She had been completely IntoxaLockedOut before she finished the fine print."

For press inquiries: Intoxalockedout+media@gmail.com

Nobody asked me to do this. Nobody paid me to do this.

I just could not look away.

— David Lazarus | Founder, INTOXALOCKEDOUT™

Legal Disclaimer

David Lazarus is not an attorney and is not engaged in the practice of law. Nothing contained in this publication constitutes legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created by reading, subscribing to, or communicating with IntoxaLockedOut. The content published here represents the personal research, documented experiences, and consumer advocacy opinions of a private citizen conducting pro se advocacy. All factual claims are based on documentation, recordings, and publicly available information in the author's possession. Readers with legal questions or disputes are encouraged to consult a licensed attorney in their jurisdiction. This publication is protected expression under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

This publication is hosted on Substack. By reading, subscribing to, or interacting with this publication you are also subject to Substack's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, available at substack.com/tos and substack.com/privacy. IntoxaLockedOut operates in full compliance with Substack's platform guidelines. The Terms of Use governing this specific publication are available at intoxalockedout.substack.com/p/terms-of-use.

© 2026 IntoxaLockedOut™ — All Rights Reserved — intoxalockedout.substack.com

https://intoxalockedout.substack.com/p/gone-five-trust-signals-disappeared