Half of the stories about billing for unused gas are clearly just theft. Why do consumers have no recourse against companies that steal from them? If I made charges to someone's card for services that weren't rendered, I'd probably go to jail.
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...
Five weeks later I returned the car and flew back home to Australia. Found letters that had been posted saying that the car hadn't been returned and was considered stolen.
They'd rented a car for a fixed period, and were arrested and jailed for driving a stolen vehicle. They've shown police the lease agreement from Hertz showing they were authorised to drive the vehicle but police either couldn't or wouldn't verify the information with Hertz.
If being arrested and jailed for this wasn't bad enough, in some cases Hertz managers were slow to respond to police requests for information - so people have sat in jail for extended periods.
For instance, if I make $500k today, the company should be obligated to pay me this amount every year plus additional compounding interest on that amount in order to account for inflation and expected salary growth over the remainder of my working life.
The company should be forced to put this money aside in a trust immediately so I do not have to worry about the company going bankrupt. Company resources and equity ought to be garnished, if necessary, in order to accomplish this.
It's frustrating and bizarre to me that people are allowed to ruin others' lives and then they do not have to bear the full consequences of their actions. Surely, if one is found to have ruined someone's life, the least our justice system can do is obligate them to repay in full?
I think that, in theory, compensating people for life-ruining is obviously the right thing to do. The issue is that it relies on people to be perfect and never try to abuse the system, and if we can assume that, then we can just get rid of law enforcement and become a communist utopia.
What is practical is making these companies far more liable than they currently are, though. It is unacceptable that they have no penalties for destroying someone's future.
While it might create an incentive, it’s a very high risk activity.
It also creates the right incentives for the company that it should:
A) not create policies that can result in ‘ruining a consumer’s life’ or at least do so knowing that it is a high risk, high cost activity.
B) know that if they choose to create such policies, they need to be adequately monitored for fraud and false positives.
That seems like a positive outcome.
It sounds good to make all these measures to make sure the scummiest people can't do their scams but most of the time you end up punishing people who need the protection the most by locking them out of the protection for not being able to legally navigate all the box checking.
Punish scammers harshly when caught, make it some exponential number of any profit gained, and open them up to audits in the past to figure out that exponential number. Opening it up to criminal liability and elimination of certain settlements without admitting guilt seem like it might help too.
Unlike the current system which relies on companies to be perfect and never try to abuse the system.
Of course, companies abusing the system happens far, far more often and at far, far larger scales than people abusing the system.
Thankfully I had no interactions with the police while driving that car.
Like, Wells Fargo set up millions of fraudulent accounts for its customers, and zero people went to jail.
Even if you accept the premise that upper level management somehow didn't know, a certain level of negligence should absolutely lead to prison time when the impact is this is large.
>A former top Wells Fargo executive avoided prison time for her role in the bank’s sham accounts scandal, after a federal judge on Friday instead sentenced her to six months of home confinement and three years of probation. She was also ordered to pay a $100,000 fine and perform 120 hours of community service.
I don’t understand why everyone in their HR department wasn’t immediately terminated and thrown into prison, and forced to pay the salaries of anyone who was fired.
Kareem Serageldin got a 30 month sentence, and Lee Farkas got 30 years but only served 9 and was released because of his "susceptibility to COVID-19 while incarcerated at the Coleman low-security prison in Wildwood" [0][1].
Talk about a lack of culpability.
0: https://www.nationalmortgagenews.com/news/mortgage-fraudster...
1: https://www.mortgagefraudblog.com/lee-farkas-released-from-p...
On two separate occasions a company has charged me for something and after I've made multiple calls and escalations (which of course can only happen during certain hours) they finally refunded me by saying "we'll make a one-time exception as a favor to you" even though they were literally stealing from me. In one case they only finally did it after I contacted the attorney general.
Honestly I don't even really care if it was a mistake (which are usually systemic issues) vs intentional, it is theft. In one example Comcast charged me a late fee even though I had autopay set up and they just missed running the charge. I wonder how many people just didn't notice.
I've long thought the only solution to these issues is to levy fines (or jail time if intentional theft) large enough to discourage the behavior. If it is still happening, keep raising the fines until it stops.
We need a corporate death penalty and three strike laws - where three is scaled to the customer base or total monetary damages or whatever. Upon death, any and all assets (including shares of the company, in case of restructuring) go to employee salaries until the company can be wound down.
That would of course require them to strive to provide the best product or service they can rather than towards maximizing their profit, though.
> Private individuals should not have to waste their time in the legal system to defend laws that the government created.
Government should not make a mockery of it self by creating laws that it doesn't intend to enforce or is incapable of.
We also have this in the US, actually we have many (state attorney generals, federal FTC and CFPB, and so on). Unfortunately (similar to our cops with crime), they're only going to bother to do anything if a company is blatantly screwing over somewhere between hundreds and thousands of people, or if the person complaining is a wealthy political donor or otherwise a friend of an elected official.
I see no real world benefit to allow such companies to exist, it creates "too big to fail" schemes, inefficient structures, and overall companies that are able to compete with literally small states or countries in terms of capital /legal / lobby power.
Beyond a certain marketcap, a company should not be allowed to grow anymore and just forced to split in multiple entities.
Two companies are not allowed to merge if their total market share would past 30%, because that would allow a monopoly and thus total control over the price of goods. A winner cannot just buyout his previous opponents indefinitely.
Similarly, a company cannot (at least where I live) sell at a loss. That would allow a company with more capital to lower prices at an impossible level until competition dies out, and then increase prices back when concurrents are wiped out.
These regulations are different of course, but the overall idea is similar: a company should not be able to press its advantage exponentially. And I think the marketcap is but a forgotten rule in these regulations.
Once a company reaches a monstrous level of market cap, it is too diversified to fail, and can press its legal / lobbying leverage on some of its subbusinesses at an unfair level against competitors. If you're a search engine company, competition against Google is not just competing against an other player in the search space. You're competing against the legal and lobbying power of 10 companies.
And that's not even mentioning state supremacy concerns. I vote for my government. They may not be always want I want them to, but hey, that democracy. I don't vote for mega corps governance. I don't want them to have bargaining power over my state or country.
Hertz has been actually triggered false arrets of its own customers -some going to jail - due to poorly implemented software logic....[1]
And no one at hertz is going to jail [2]. They are settling as usual.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hertz-claims-false-arrests/
[2] https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...
Also, at what point do police stop accepting "stolen" car reports from Hertz? This is such a failure on so many levels, why is Hertz the only ones receiving the hate?
Ultimately I'll point the fault at the district attorney, as they are the ones who decide what is prosecuted and what is not.
They take unsubstantiated allegations from hertz and put people to jail, but at the same time don't lift a finger to prosecute the clearly guilty corporations for fraud. So yes, while mistakes are made all around, the ultimate guilty party is the district attorney.
For it to be the DA's fault, lots of other things have failed first. So I don't really see how the DA is that relevant. If devs failed by making software that doesn't work in a way that the company using it cannot keep track of their inventory in a way that makes it look like their customers have not returned items in a way that looks like it has been stolen so that they can make a report to the police who cannot properly investigate which results in someone being arrested but never charged does not make any sense for a DA to receive any blame in this situation at all. (jeebus that must be the longest sentence I've ever typed).
Because only they are the one with the power to actually act on this and pursue charges. They are supposed to validate the facts before proceeding, but here they just take the word of hertz without any evidence (since hertz's systems are messed up as you say so they don't have any idea what's where) and run with it, accusing innocent people.
The DA is the one with the power to tell hertz to produce credible evidence or go pound sand. But they don't.
Stuff like this is easy to charge back with your credit card company.
But in this case, the article makes it clear that the people were able to get the charges reversed by talking to Hertz. It wasn't necessarily convenient, but the funds were returned when a human saw the mistake.
> If I made charges to someone's card for services that weren't rendered, I'd probably go to jail.
If you entered into an agreement with someone to do business and then accidentally charged them the wrong amount, you would not go to jail. That's what happened here, as annoying as it is.
I know this is HN and we're supposed to get our pitchforks out any time a company makes a mistake, but your analogy doesn't hold. Legally, intentional theft is a higher bar than a mistake. You're right that you'd be in trouble if you just started charging random people's credit cards fraudulently, but you're not going to jail if you're doing business with someone and you occasionally make a mistake about the amount when it's time to bill them. (FYI: Billing mistakes happen all the time at scale)
If you could prove that someone in Hertz was diabolically masterminding a scheme to knowingly milk money from customers by charging EV drivers for gas, you could have a case. But if Hertz is just accidentally charging a couple people here and there for gas (as appears to be the case from the article) then that's not "stealing". It's just a mistake.
That's not actually true. This sort of "oh, you never have to pay for services not rendered" is mostly just a fiction. I've had multiple issues with major credit card issuers who refused to persist chargebacks when vendors screwed me.
The other issue is that, even if you successfully chargeback against a vendor, oftentimes that vendor is a monopoly or duopoloy, and they will terminate your account and ban any new accounts using the same name or card number, and you'll be screwed.
> The other issue is that, even if you successfully chargeback against a vendor, oftentimes that vendor is a monopoly or duopoloy, and they will terminate your account and ban any new accounts using the same name or card number, and you'll be screwed.
That sounds like what someone who's never had to waste hours getting 'stuff like this' charged back, with varying levels of success, would say.
Hah. Your card company will accept the dispute, Hertz will provide them with the rental contract you signed and say "he agreed to pay it!", and your card company will close the dispute without ever even following up with you.
> But in this case, the article makes it clear that the people were able to get the charges reversed by talking to Hertz. It wasn't necessarily convenient, but the funds were returned when a human saw the mistake.
Actually the article makes it clear that they had to go round and round in circles with bot-like support reps who probably haven't ever seen a Tesla in whatever slum they can afford.
> If you entered into an agreement with someone to do business and then accidentally charged them the wrong amount, you would not go to jail.
It's not accidental when you keep doing it until the news gets involved. BTW, how can they even charge a fuel fee without a human being involved to... you know... fuel it? Shouldn't that human have noticed that there was no gas tank? Hmm... Almost like it wasn't accidental.
Just take a look at wage theft and federal police theft stats compared with all other forms of robbery in the US - it’s out of control but the only thing that seems to get actioned on is the small shoplifting issue, not the vastly worse forms of theft (per dollar value)
You're dealing with broken automated systems and an out-sourced customer support agent.
Wait until LLMs arrive on the scene and further exacerbate the problem.
I really think government needs to enact laws that make companies compensate people for their time when they have to deal with bureaucratic nightmares like this. Right now companies just get to externalize the costs of their fucks ups onto everyone else.
One obvious example: OneTrust cookie banners. They're nearly all misconfigured to have the "Reject Cookies" button greyed out or missing (or a link to a little minigame) and the "Accept Cookies" button prominent. Are all companies simply so incompetent? Is OneTrust (easy; no, it's correct on their own website). Or are they deliberately and maliciously breaking the law and when challenged will just do the wide-eyed "oh gosh, I'm such a silly-billy clutz with these things tee-hee"
> The term ‘Hanlon’s Razor’ and its accompanying phrase originally came from an individual named Robert. J. Hanlon from Scranton, Pennsylvania as a submission for a book of jokes and aphorisms, published in 1980 by Arthur Bloch.
https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/hanlon...
Hopefully we can collectively begin to put it to rest.
What they found, was that every (100%) error in price went to the favor of the company. Not one single error was in favor of the customer.
Often, the stores were good about correcting the error, but the cashier could never do it. They always had to go to the service counter.
Yes, customers that notice it can have it corrected to the accurate, lower price. But the problem is that whenever there were "whoopsies", it's hard to just believe it was just a bug or well-intentioned mistake when there were never mistakes that would have resulted in a lower price.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/regulations/massachusetts/202-CM...
If you walk into Walmart and intentionally walk out with a banana without paying, you can't get out of prosecution by claiming that you didn't know it was illegal to do that.
If, on the other hand, you accidentally neglect to scan the banana at the self checkout then it is a valid defense to say that you thought you'd already scanned it in and you must have gotten confused by all the other items you were handling.
Theft requires intent.
> If you walk into Walmart and intentionally walk out with a banana without paying, you can't get out of prosecution by claiming that you didn't know it was illegal to do that.
> If, on the other hand, you accidentally neglect to scan the banana at the self checkout then it is a valid defense to say that you thought you'd already scanned it in and you must have gotten confused by all the other items you were handling.
> Theft requires intent.
No one will care what you say when you will get caught. https://www.good.is/lawyer-explains-the-risk-of-using-self-c...
Call me old fashioned, but I'm not going to take legal advice from TikTok personalities, especially when the claim sounds like one of those scarebait articles newspapers print on a bad news day.
The only way out is to reverse the situation - companies should have even less leniency. You can't expect a single person to know the specifics of every law or to pay attention 100% of the time, but you can absolutely expect a company to be able to hire the necessary manpower to ensure near-bulletproof compliance.
Big company incompetence exists because, paradoxically, it's more profitable.
The solution is making it less profitable, or better yet treating the business like you'd treat a human. Put a derogatory report on their credit and make sure they can't get any kind of credit (often even including pre-paid rent) for 7 years....