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Hertz customers arrested, jailed and held at gunpoint after false theft reports
- HeavenFox 5y agoI once watched a video about exotic car rental business, where they mentioned that if you rent a car and fail to return it, it's technically not theft, but conversion. As a result it's difficult to get the cops involved. Not sure how Hertz managed to do it.
- kube-system 5y agoIIRC this varies significantly by state.
- extr 5y agoVery interesting. When reading this I was wondering how/why Hertz managed to make this a criminal rather than civil matter. It feels to me like the ideal way to handle it would be indeed treat it as a "conversion". Contract says if you keep it past X date you agree to pay Y price for it, they charge your payment method, that fails, they forward your account to a debt collection agency. Worst case you sell the car at a loss compared to what you paid Hertz and learn a valuable lesson. This is not a violent crime, they have all your details and know who you are already! No need to put out an APB.
- literallycancer 5y agoI really hope that as self driving cars get better all of these car rental scammers are going to go bankrupt and something like Uber or the car manufacturers themselves take over that market.
- bjt2n3904 5y agoI'm always a little skeptical about these articles... But it brought back to mind the last time I rented a car. After verifying my driver's license, and confirming my insurance, they asked me to give them a number for someone I was staying with. I was pretty frustrated, but even more frustrated that I gave up and told them.
- vmception 5y agoI just lie about the less consequential stuff, like a third person's phone number. Very seamless experience. I generally have lawyers on retainer to bounce questions off of to understand my liability vectors. So, yay, money privilege.
- bb88 5y agoI'm not sure why you're skeptical, it seems pretty easy enough to track down: arrest records, court papers, etc, and reports are as old as two years ago.
- duxup 5y agoDo you feel it is bad you gave them that number?
- brewdad 5y agoI can guarantee a company the size of Hertz has the means to track the car via GPS or other means. If they really need to track the car (or me) down, they can find it (us). Having the contact info of the person I'm staying with is completely unnecessary. It's an invasion of privacy of a completely unrelated third party to our agreement.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoI live in europe. If you get falsely arrested, and lose your realestate license because some huge company did something really wrong, I was under a steretypical impression that lawyers would be calling you 24/7 to take your case and sue them for huge amount of money (and then take a huge cut out of that)... especially for the mother and 40days jail time. Is there more to these stories, or are we just waiting for "Hertz pays X millions to falsly arrested mother" to appear in the newspapers?
- southerntofu 5y agoI live in europe, too. That kind of lawyers can be very expensive for common people. Most of us don't dream to sue companies/cops and even less so with famous lawyers as legal advice. The closest we have is consumers associations who will take complaint and in some cases start legal actions. In this case it's even more complicated, because the company is at fault for making an administrative error in declaring stolen vehicles, but the heart of the scandal is that the police followed through on baseless claims and abused their power on random people. As always, the cops are the real criminals here, but where i come from (France) there's close to zero chance to get any form of justice against cops even in the most egregious cases of murder and rape. > are we just waiting for "Hertz pays X millions to falsly arrested mother" to appear in the newspapers? Now that a big newspaper has covered the story and revealed there's hundreds of cases, that's probably what's gonna happen.
- oliwarner 5y agoAlso European. My indignation is at the police's use of force. Even if I wasn't arrested or jailed, being dragged out of a car at gunpoint is such an inappropriate response to a nonviolent theft report. It's dangerous. It's scary.
- rendall 5y agoThe statement from Hertz at the end implies that they were not false reports after all. It's a pretty confident thing for a company to say. If true, then there will not be large payouts.
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- lgleason 5y agohmmm, I was thinking of doing their Tesla rental....but given the risk of being falsely arrested that may not be a good idea.
- Nextgrid 5y agoOn the other hand, with Teslas being able to log & report their location in real-time it seems like it would already collect all the evidence you need to prove your innocence at the first sign of trouble.
- mgerdts 5y agoAbout 5 years ago I flew in to SFO for a work trip. A few hours after I picked up my Hertz rental car I got a message stating that I hadn't picked up my car yet. Checking the rental paperwork, I saw that I had somehow rented this car as someone else. This, despite I did the normal gold service process that involves providing my license to an attendant at the gate. I was happy then that I didn't have a run in withe the police, thinking it would be a minor inconvenience at most. I guess it can get a lot worse.
- phendrenad2 5y agoRenting cars has always been a bad experience. Terrible websites where you don't know what car you're going to get. You arrive and they try to upsell you on a car. The employee spends 10 minutes filling out forms on their computer before they can rent you a car. Employees multitasking, going out to the lot to do car stuff while you're standing there with your ID and credit card in hand, your paperwork half filled out. Never enough staff on hand. The auto lots are always in an awkward spot that's hard to drive out of. So I'm not surprised that their theft entry system is something trash. It's probably an Access database running on some Windows 95 node. Or maybe Gentoo. It's clear from stories like this that Hertz has chosen to double-down on not caring, and make it part of their business model. I mean look at this non-response: > Hertz declined to comment for this story but has previously said the "vast majority" of cases "involve renters who were many weeks or even months overdue returning vehicles and who stopped communicating with (Hertz) well beyond the scheduled due date." The only way a company responds like that is when they fully believe that they're a staple and CAN'T go out of business. We'll see about that...
- petre 5y agoWe were just ripped of by Booking.com Transport Limited two weeks ago. Basically if anything goes wrong it's your fault and they will not give you a refund. I have to report them to the European Consumer Centers Network but since they're not registered in the EU they might get away with it. Other people had their deposits blocked for months before the rental companies released their funds after numerous complaints. Big companies like Hertz, Sixt etc are almost always the worst offenders. Sixt has five people at the reception desk but you were required to book online. They could have as well put a chimpanzee in charge of the whole reception desk.
- literallycancer 5y agoCan't you charge back the deposit transaction if they don't return it?
- petre 5y agoI tried but bank sided with them, since they don't want to get into legal issues. Booking.com claims the reservation is a "non refundable time limited special offer" in order to rip you off. This is anti consumer behaviour that should just be illegal. Just avoid them at all costs. Neither Booking.com nor Sixt would resolve the issue. I called support, they just fed me social engineering mumbo jumbo.
- niij 5y agoI had multiple bad experiences with Hertz and no longer rent from them. The final straw was when I had to switch out a car mid rental because of mechanical issues. They over double charged me acting like it was a whole new (one way) rental. It took weeks of phone calls with no resolution before I initiated a charge back to fix their issue. Horrible and incompetent customer service.
- stevespang 5y agoCheck out "Institute For Justice" on YouTube for more Bad Kharma that cops do
- rexreed 5y agoThe car rental industry is slowing going the way of Blockbuster. Maybe not in the next year or two, but it is an inevitability.
- gruez 5y agoWhat are they going to be replaced with? Car "sharing" companies? Are people going to miraculously not going to require car rentals (eg. for trips) anymore?
- rexreed 5y agoIt certainly seems that way... in the long run. In the beginning, in 1997, Netflix was a company that sent DVDs by mail. Fast forward, they're an internet video-on-demand company. The writing was on the wall for Blockbuster way back in 1997 but it took over a decade for their model to go bust. The not-so-well known fact is that Blockbuster was already losing money and going bankrupt even before Netflix finished them off. Similarly, Hertz has declared bankruptcy and the other car rental companies are not far behind. Uber and Lyft are certainly not the cause of their demise in the same way that 1997-era Netflix couldn't be blamed for Blockbuster's demise. But the writing was on the wall, and the writing is certainly on the wall here. This comment thread on HN from 2008 is quite an interesting read if you see some of the comments denying Blockbuster's precarious position: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280425
- brewdad 5y agoHertz declared bankruptcy because a global pandemic shut down travel worldwide overnight and they were highly extended in credit that up to that moment made sense in a normally functioning society and low interest rates.
- rexreed 5y agoWhen you're living life on the edge, every short-term problem can turn into a life-threatening disaster. If it wasn't the pandemic, it would be something else. The rental car industry is living paycheck to paycheck. Hertz (and Avis and Enterprise and Dollar Thrifty and ...) have endemic and structural problems. Indeed, read this article, which was originally written in 2012 and updated in 2018... before the pandemic: https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/07/13/surprising-facts-abut-the-rental-car-industry.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/07/13/surprising... "... this interferes with the ability to develop a moat around their products and/or services. And on a practical level, it impedes margins and profitability. Avis and Hertz, for instance, have been profitable in only one and two of the last five years, respectively."
- skrillhouse 5y agoI recently rented a car from a similarly well-known company. When I went to return it, the location was completely abandoned. No attendant in the lot, no staff in the office. I waited with other customers for 30 minutes before I finally found a staff member walking through the parking lot, who said I could just leave the keys on the dashboard and go. I had assumed there’d be some sort of more official checkout process, but was tired enough after driving all day to just accept it. Sure enough, I got an email two days later saying the car had never been returned. I explained the situation to customer service on the phone, who mostly chided me on not getting a receipt after returning (difficult to do when no one is working there). At the time I joked with friends that the rental company was going to have me arrested for car theft. Luckily I just got an email receipt from them over a week later without comment. Guess it could have gone a lot worse.
- londons_explore 5y agoThis is a common scam for stealing cars... Get car rental returns to be misdirected to a nearby lot, for example by turning around a sign, taking a few cars over a few hours, and then vanishing.
- henvic 5y agoSource?
- vmception 5y agoIts an instruction manual
- londons_explore 5y agoIt nearly happened to me... I only took my car away again because I got suspicious about the staff saying the other site was "only for pick ups", and decided to go fill up with fuel (it wasn't quite full, and I didn't want to be charged for returning it not full) and on the way back check the other site the opposite side of the road... Spoke to the staff there and they had no idea someone else was accepting returns of their cars! The people doing the returns often don't even know their doing anything criminal. They're normally hired from craigslist and asked to wear a yellow vest and put up a few "Hertz car return area" signs, then take return of a bunch of cars, while a car transporter is hired to pick up all the cars and take them to a port to leave the country. The whole lot is organised by the mastermind by phone, who is probably located in a foreign country and is using a VoIP number to be nearly untraceable.
- jfrunyon 5y agoWealthy business or person calls cops to report a crime: cops immediately act upon it (usually despite a lack of any legal cause for arrest such as an officer witnessing the commission of a crime or getting an arrest warrant), presuming guilt. Anyone else calls cops to report a crime: cops will come out to take a report in a few days, at which point they will ... do nothing. Hope you have insurance that covers theft.
- jpe90 5y agoThe arrests mentioned in this article took place days to months after the false theft reports.
- jfrunyon 5y agoI never claimed otherwise.
- mantaraygun 5y ago> Wealthy business or person calls cops to report a crime: cops immediately act upon it I guess Hertz doesn't count as a wealthy business, since they're going bankrupt?
- refurb 5y agoIf you call to report a stolen car the same will happen which makes your observation wrong. Overconfidently wrong based on tone.
- albert_e 5y agoHertz screwed up applying my earned rewards points on a rental and charged me $400. I was on chat with their customer support while booking the rental and specifically mentioned that I wanted to use my rewards points for the rental and followed their guidance. Their booking system was crap and would not show rewards being applied half the time. I took screenshots and saved all chat transcripts. When I saw that they finally charged me full amount upon returning the car, I sent them all the proofs I had that this rental was supposed to come out of my rewards points. Upon my escalation they reviewed it twice and they refused to reverse the charge and said I should consider their response "final". I gave up and ate the $400 charge. Wish I had more patience and time to fight it.
- saberdancer 5y agoNext time go to your bank and charge back.
- Nextgrid 5y agoCard chargebacks are the way to deal with scum like this. Any time a company fobs you off go to your bank. They pay fees for every chargeback (including if they win), and too many chargebacks will threaten their ability to accept payments at all.
- FounderBurr 5y agoThe only reason to file a police report years after a car went “missing” would be as a legally required prelude to making a claim against an insurance policy for the value of the car I would not be shocked to find out there was a pattern here of reporting cars “stolen” that had become worth more “dead than alive” via insurance fraud. Also speaking to culpability, someone at hertz had to swear under penalty of perjury that these vehicles were stolen. They may have acted “on orders” from above but they can be held criminally liable by the courts if they choose to actually pursue it.