It could be worse - Hertz falsely accused hundreds of people of stealing cars which lead to felonies, arrests and jail time.
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...
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.
Thankfully I had no interactions with the police while driving that car.
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.
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.
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.