Hertz customers arrested, jailed and held at gunpoint after false theft reports
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
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...
But when it works it does work well. I have the board down to a science: shuttle to hertz, look for my name on board, walk to car directly as indicated by board, drive away with the only human interaction being the person scanning the car as I exit.
As a customer, I completely get that feeling.
As someone who has worked in auto rental (although for Budget Truck), the reality is usually along the lines of rental clerks making slightly above minimum wage, the entire city getting drastically overbooked by corporate, and customers who were due to return (and counted on for availability) not doing so. They have no urgency because it happens on a regular basis and they're the ones getting screamed at all day because of it even though they have no control over it.
Also I believe one of them (Hertz or maybe Enterprise) told me if I did the pay-in-advance deal they would guarantee a car was there because they'd bring one in from the airport if needed. Some locations have very few cars and can be hit-or-miss.
"When can I see a refund on my card?" I asked, as I pulled up Uber to go somewhere else (because I was not about to use my personal card, on principle with their behavior).
"Sorry, prepaid reservations are nonrefundable".
Uhh, no. You're not going to accept a reservation from me using a credit card, and then decide that my photo ID matching that credit card is insufficient, deny me a rental, and deny me a refund.
That got sorted out, but took more than one call to Corporate.
Or one call to your CC chargeback department, which would bite them more
Capital One sided with the airline and closed my case. Guess you can't depend on chargebacks like I thought you could.
Discover was my favorite. They had a forgiveness policy and wouldn't raise your rate just because another card did. And their website was very friendly to use.
(In fact it's automated and two clicks away).
Of course there are expensive consequences when that system is abused.
Is it more like a wire transfer, or a CC payment?
What are the expensive consequences you are talking about?
> What are the expensive consequences you are talking about?
The system offers no security for the merchant - in fact cancelled charges cost a fee, even if the charge was completely valid.
* yes - physical signature on paper, except when paying online
** this is a topic for a full comment on it's own, but here's the gist: Under German law you can't "take back" your money from an company that has filed for bankruptcy - in fact even payments made to you before the filing might be clawed back by the administrator - which means that you will receive (and customers from insolvent airlines have received) an angry letter demanding the money back. With chargebacks this is less likely to happen as the chargeback will be paid for by the merchant's bank, not the merchant directly, but the legal situation is unclear.
There was specifically a special directive by US Dept of Transportation directing airlines to refund customers for any flights that were modified or canceled after pandemic restrictions started in Mar 2020.
https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/us-department-t...
https://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer/ticket-refunds
As of now, they even explicitly say non refundable tickets are refundable if airlines cancel:
https://www.transportation.gov/individuals/aviation-consumer...
> Non-refundable tickets - Passengers who purchase non-refundable tickets are not entitled to a refund unless the airline makes a promise to provide a refund or the airline cancels a flight or makes a significant schedule change.
I am also confused how Orbitz would be involved in tdeck’s situation. Either they paid Orbitz, or they paid Singapore Airlines, but either way only one of them would be able to refund them.
As for Orbitz, I used them to book the ticket, and SQ's customer service told me they couldn't refund me because they had a policy that only the agent could modify the reservation. When I tried to contact Orbitz they just told me I would need to talk to the airline.
Yes people tend to have a slightly delusional view of how effective chargebacks can be based on limited experiences. If you're fighting with a small merchant like a local store or a non famous online merchant you're going to win basically every time.
If you're fighting with a rental car company, an airline, a hotel chain, a household name company, or similar, it's an entirely different story. The interaction has much more to do with who's more valuable to the card issuer than who's right.
If it’s easy to book then not turn up, people will. Then if you know a significant percentage on average doesn’t turn up, it would be lost profit to not overbook.
Fully paid non-refundable services should, I agree, very conservative in overbooking.
Can confirm that getting off the shuttle, looking up at the Hertz Gold board expecting to see either a parking space number or a section listed by your name, and instead seeing "See Agent" is absolutely rage inducing.
Considering Hertz emerged from bankruptcy just 5 months ago I think they're pretty aware of their capability to go out of business...
Enterprise does this and I just find it completely unfathomable.
You did a thorough cataloging of the car when you received it from the last renter. Just give me that fucking report instead of acting like an oblivious idiot.
I found the walkaround off-putting initially (years ago). Especially when you get it wet from washing and this it hides all the minor damage. But they have pretty lax rules about what counts as damage.
The best though, is those airport lots with cameras that record the condition of the car as you drive out.
I try to avoid rentals because their business model seems to rely on billing the same scratch to as many customers as they can.
Not gonna let them charge me for something they missed, same with uhauls that have a ton of little cosmetic damages not on the papers.
It makes them really uncomfortable, as they know that they won’t be able to charge me €4000 after the rental for whatever arbitrary damage they decide I caused - although it doesn’t stop them trying - I had sixt earlier this year claim that I had stolen the passenger side door. Fortunately I had filmed the car at the unmanned drop-off, along with an airport sign with the time and date - otherwise I would have been on the hook for an entire new car, as they said it was irreparable.
They only dropped the matter after I filed a complaint with the business regulator in the country they were operating in - and that came with a lifetime ban from renting from them. Good riddance.
I like Enterprise cause they're affordable, but they really take it to the next level. I had a full insurance (0% OOP) and they still made me do the handover dance twice.
Including one time where I hit a kangaroo and damaged the left front quarter pannel, only charged me a few hundred dollars to repair said damages which was a lot less than I expected. Though I have been almost using Car Next Door exclusively for two years so perhaps things have changed.
Car Next Door is the same, but I'm willing to put up with a bit of inconvenience there to get a service I can't get at a reasonable price from the big rentals (light commercial vehicle available close by and for short periods).
Even if true, that does not address those not in that "vast majority". Truly effective corporate speak for "whatever".
Why the dig on Gentoo? haven't used it for years but it's perfectly fine distro :)
OTOH yes this story is worrying!
Hertz has spent 500 million USD on Accenture to implement SAP and the project royally failed.
So you are perhaps right with MS Access.
Furthermore, Lidl has spent 600 million USD to implement SAP and failed.
Join their frequent renter programs (no need to be a frequent renter). Then you can generally just walk to the lot, pick a car and go.
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.
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.
When returning, I arrive 5 mins before closing (traffic) to find the entire business park locked up. My phone is dead as the drive took much longer than expected so I couldn't call their head office or anything. While waiting outside thinking what to do, the gates opened and a car came out. I tried to signal them down to ask for them to hold open the gate for me but they just drove off when I got close, so I got back in the car and quickly drove back in as the gate was closing and very nearly scratched the side of the car on the closing gate.
Inside, the business park was completely deserted so I just parked the car beside the rental company's portakabin and posted the keys through their letterbox.
I walked back to the gate and realised there didn't seem to be any kind of button to exit the business park without a key or fob, so I was stuck. I wait about 45 minutes to see if anyone turns up, while looking for some kind of pedestrian exit, but find nothing. Without a phone, I realise the only way I'm getting out tonight is to climb onto the roof of one of the portakabins and try to climb out using one of the overhanging trees. Somehow I manage this without injuring myself too badly.
Obviously no rental company means no shuttle bus, and no phone means no cab, so I just had to trek the several miles back to the airport, using the light pollution for direction.
Next day I get a return receipt emailed through from the rental company, so it all worked out in the end.
First, they might have guard dogs roaming the lot after hours.
Second, they might have motion sensitive alarms that summon the police.
If someone called the police, that would have been a good thing as they'd have let me out. Trespass on non-residential land here is usually not a crime provided you don't do any damage.
Besides, I was in my mid 20s so such risk taking behaviour was par for the course. I was much more worried about getting a fine for a late return. Even now I still do a little bit of urbex from time to time.
Glad you made it back safe. I can’t imagine my significant other going through this BS in a seedy part of an unfamiliar town.
Honestly, it was kind of fun. I was very tired and a bit muddy by the time I got back to the city, having been carrying my luggage. I had also hurt my ankle a little bit when getting out of the business park - but nothing really hurts in your 20s. Girlfriend at the time had fallen asleep while waiting for me so she didn't even notice I was many hours late.
I guess one thing is it's the UK, so you don't ever really feel too unsafe outside of a handful of areas in a few major cities (speaking as a male). No dangerous animals, roads are relatively safe and people are nearly always helpful and friendly. Felt a bit like when I would get lost alone in the forest as a kid, only to eventually find my way back to civilization after a few hours.
It's so hard to get lost now that I almost miss it. Can't believe I'm getting nostalgic for the time I got trapped in a car rental place...
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?
I wish more courts would allow rocket dockets to plow through the cases. Very rarely in these cases are there questions of law actually involved. Mostly it's procedural delays. The longer you can delay the better your chance the other side gives up -- so you don't actually have to argue the merits of your case.
Hertz may want to settle out-of-court in the mothers case, but even then these stories don't have the legs they used to. The attack on truth since Trump has been ongoing and severe, and I think most people are either a) in a head-space where everything seems to be falling apart, and so anything shy of video-taped murder is ignored, or b) in a head-space where nothing is real or true and the lamestream media is just manipulating everyone all the time with everything. In both cases, the public has been severed from it's own interest.
It's funny because I grew up watching movies where the good guy was often trying to get some proof to expose the bad guy, who was willing to do anything to stop the leak. But now? What happens in a world where no proof is believable? The entire equation goes out of balance, and politicians, ever the practical ones, respond to different incentives, and avoid issues like this one that don't play to anyone's base and antagonize money.
Seriously... did you have to?
When you want to fix the error in the quote, the way to denote it is to replace the misspelled word with the correctly spelled word in square brackets, like this:
> I was under a [stereotypical] impression that lawyers...
This raises a question. In addition to "sic" in brackets meaning "this error is in the source" it also can be a verb meaning "set an animal to attack". What happens if someone misspells that, and you want to correct it when you quote them? Just putting it in brackets might be interpreted as you saying that the word before it is misspelled.
Hertz is going through bankruptcy proceedings. During this process, a court will prioritize which debts Hertz is going to be paying off, and in what priority. Some of these debts are people who have sued Hertz for these issues. The court will be determining who gets paid and whose debts are written off under bankruptcy law.
if a person fucks up, massive consequences. A company? I'm pretty sure the CEO and board got plenty of cash, and lots of protections against all their wrongdoings
If Hertz reports a car stolen because front desk staff made a mistake, that's simply not criminal. This also applies to you as an individual too. If you report your car stolen when you forgot where you parked it, that is also not criminal. Hertz is being treated the same as you would be.
I don't see anything in this story that describes a crime. (except for the people who may have actually stolen cars) These are descriptions of civil wrongdoings.
> Someone at Hertz is culpable for not taking steps to prevent this from happening.
Of course, this is what the 191 lawsuits are about. They are to determine Hertz's culpability in -- with what the article describes -- are the civil wrongdoings I mentioned in my above comment.
It's far from clear that anybody at Hertz is criminally culpable, which is what was suggested upthread, with talk of people making false statements being arrested.
The solution to everything isn't "lock 'em up and throw away the key". We have functional civil courts, and they are more than capable of remediating wrongs.
> We have functional civil courts, and they are more than capable of remediating wrongs
That's actually a good one. Thanks for the laugh.
As to why some states criminalize it... I don't know, too many years of voting for tough-on-crime politicians?
In every one I've heard of, it can (and eventually will, for varying values of 'eventually') get you arrested for grand theft auto.
I remember a recent rental car contract of mine that pointed out these specific state laws. e.g.: https://law.justia.com/codes/nevada/2010/title15/chapter205/...
If there’s some memo floating around that says otherwise, then maybe it’s a crime.
"Knowingly" and "willfully" have legally significant meanings with their own standards of the mental state that qualifies. It is then up to the court to determine whether or not your actions have met those conditions.
There has to be some abstraction layer between a company and its officers, or companies can't take the risk of delegating anything to employees. The reality of society is that sometimes something is going to get fucked up, and the dispute resolution process is expensive and messy. That's the legal system, and it exists for a reason. Ideally, most people don't have to use it very often, and the 0.001% of the time when something fails catastrophically, the pain of that one individual that it didn't work for makes society less painful for everyone else longer term. This person lost their real estate license, so that thousands of other people can drive someone else's car while they're on vacation without having to buy the car with cash outright. Net win? Probably.
To some extent, you can always reduce the risk of anything to as low as you want. It's just that at some point, the cost of that makes the entire endeavor not worthwhile financially. Risk aversion is a tax on innovation, so you don't want to become too risk averse. I think society has found a decent balance here.
Okay? Let's change the nature of business then.
> I think society has found a decent balance here.
People spending over a month in jail is the right balance here?
What's to say this isn't something that's going to keep happening? What's the incentive for a company to actually do the right thing?
Honestly fines for companies should be far, far higher. At the amounts of single to double digits percentage of the company's revenue.
Some people’s employers would be aware of a pending arrest warrant within hours, likely before they are. People get immediately suspended without pay and need to hire an attorney, etc to figure out wtf is going on. Depending on what happened, it could take months to restore everything.
I manage risk for a living. If a consumer needs to be worried about felony arrest when renting a fricking car, something is very wrong. I would assert that if the company’s incompetence in implementing, administrating, and signing off on controls is such that customers are being arrested because they can’t figure out wth their rental cars are, the executives should have Sarbanes-Oxley exposure and potential criminal liability.
Indeed, but it is not surprising. Despite all copaganda, police has always never been "your friend", but the armed enforcers of capitalism.
When a company files a police report, police are not going to question it. They will bash your door in, shoot your dog and/or yourself and/or your neighbors, ask questions later, and only pay for damages when ordered to do so by a lengthy court process.
And no, I'm not just polemic here, this is reality. There have been countless house "search and seizure" operations on people who had committed the "crime" of having their wifi hotspot unsecured, who have downloaded stuff from university libraries (R.I.P. Aaron Swartz), for running TOR exit nodes, or for exposing government or corporate "secrets" that caused scandals.
They only care about capital, they care about maximizing their KPIs (which tend to have far more to do with protecting the state and/or generating revenue) and getting paid. Their KPIs only reflect protecting capital as much as trickles down from the elected executives who are ultimately at the top of the accountability (or lack thereof) pyramid.
If enforcement cared directly about capital dangers to the public and crimes of possession would be taken a lot less seriously than they are and property crimes would be taken a lot more seriously.
Yes. If the CEO and board want the responsibility of owning a company then yes they should also own-up to fuck-ups by their employees.
If big companies don't want to be responsible for thousands of employees then perhaps it's time to split up the responsibilities -- and the compensations too.
But in this case, it seems like there are several hundred false reports over several years. It's so much, that Hertz was able to hand over a database of data related to it. This is negligence, they clearly know they are doing something wrong and they know it's harming other people.
If tens or hundreds of your employees are making false reports consistently over many years and you're not doing something to resolve it? I suppose the answer to your question is yes.
For it to be a crime, a single person must willingly make a statement that they know is false. Making a statement and being incorrect about it is not criminal. Knowing that other people have made incorrect statements is not criminal.
That being said, making mistakes that harms other people is a civil tort. And that’s why these cases are going to a judge now as mentioned in the article. It also worth noting that the article is about allegedly untrue reports of car theft. Whether or not those claims are accurate still remains to be tested in court.
The idea is that Mark would feel some sort of inconvenience if something was screwed up this badly, ideally, in light of the fact that he's receiving $16,000,000/year
They also get bonuses if the employees decide to do their jobs right.
If a single employee's actions can cause an innocent person to be arrested, the company procedures were clearly inadequate - in this case, a lack of a "four eyes" principle at car checkin/checkout and insufficient record-keeping and quality assurance of these records.
It is the job of the employees to do their tasks correctly... and the job of management to provide the necessary resources for employees to do their tasks and to implement procedures to catch and prevent (inevitable) human or machine error.
The organization which he manages does this on a regular basis.
If said person get immediately compensated to full extent and a lot more on top. If any record of being criminally charged and any trace of arrest / interaction with police in regards to criminal matter gets wiped out. Then maybe.
Otherwise fuck those vacationers. They're free to go and buy car or vote for the system that does not jail people for hint of offence.
"Thank you for your patriotic sacrifice, comrade customer."
You just failed Voight-Kampff test.
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.
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.
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.
Overconfidently wrong based on tone.
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.
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.
Not sure how Hertz managed to do it.
It took weeks of phone calls with no resolution before I initiated a charge back to fix their issue. Horrible and incompetent customer service.
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.
I think you’re over complicating it.
I generally have lawyers on retainer to bounce questions off of to understand my liability vectors. So, yay, money privilege.
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
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...
"... 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."
Indeed. Stuff like DriveNow (which is BMW's service) or public transport are eating up car rentals, and Uber plus videoconferences are eating up the "executive wants to drive from the airport to their destination" market... and anyway, the financial situation of Hertz and friends was dire even before corona hit, because they all have leased their cars for "cashflow/capex vs opex optimization" instead of outright buying them for cash.
There will absolutely be specialists remaining - UHaul etc. for moving trucks, or stretch limo and camper rentals - but the days of point-of-sale rental companies are over.