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Comment by unstatusthequo | Hacker News Reader

Lawyer here. Not legal advice.

Theft of property is criminal. Not sure how you reasoned yourself sideways on that with red tape bullshit. Sue the company and the renter in small claims court and have some fun with it. Company will be forced to deal with it and that might get them to eventually change their bullshit policy. Credit card of renter should be pre-auth’d for full replacement of new item. How they aren’t doing that is negligent and asking for trouble. So is having an overly restrictive insurance policy. Makes me think the company has terrible legal counsel.

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Seems like a straightforward case for small claims court against KitSplit. You just have to sell the judge on a very straightforward case. The thing about not getting fucked over in situations like this is having the intestinal fortitude to bully companies like KitSplit into making it right for you. You'll probably get compensated by them by blogging about it but you probably could have just muscled them to give you your $4.5k in small claims court.

> Theft of property is criminal.

This isn't theft it's misappropriation. Subtle distinction, but basically: theft covers illegal takings, misappropriation covers illegal "keepings." Sadly New York doesn't have the misappropriation framework other states have.

NY has something called "false promise" larceny, which is similar, but it requires showing intent to defraud even before the rental agreement. The mere keeping of rented property isn't sufficient to prove intent, explicitly in the statute.

Worked for a prosecutor in another city. Withheld rental cars were incredibly annoying, even without the weird NY penal code.

Naturally this is not legal advice and don't steal or misappropriate stuff it's dumb and cruel and probably illegal for you for some reason I'm not realizing.

And if you don't recover anything, you can also write this off on taxes for the business you hopefully incorporated for the purpose of renting your equipment through.

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