Hertz to pay $168M to customers arrested due to Hertz’s false police reports(viewfromthewing.com) |
Hertz to pay $168M to customers arrested due to Hertz’s false police reports(viewfromthewing.com) |
This means I'm driving a rental car for 100+ days a year.
I've tried all the major rental brands and Hertz is a terrible experience even when they're not calling the police on you by mistake. Their systems don't work quite right, there's a bunch of hidden fees, and their customer service is lacking at best.
I swear by Enterprise and purchasing the extra insurance to cover any damages. They've done right by me as a customer across many different cities and locations.
I know that some people are always going to just buy whatever is the cheapest or whatever deal gets them the most points with credit card or whatever. And that seems to be where Hertz makes their money.
But for anyone willing to pay a little more for a good experience and less stress Enterprise is my recommendation.
I've had a good experience because they just don't seem to care. That is, the employees working there just check in/out, sign the paperwork, that's it. I haven't had to spend a lot of time turning down questionable options and upgrades. There haven't been turn-in inspections where they claim that tiny scratch on the car with 160k miles is my fault.
They just seem to get me checked in so they can get back to their phone. It's not a premium experience by any means, but it's simple.
In life, i've learned, that if an optional extra price isn't listed for that option, don't select it. and if you really need that option and the price isn't there, just hit the back button and don't use that service ever again.
Last trip Enterprise was fully booked so I did try Budget. Their office is so small that you actually have to arrive at our local airport and THEN call the attendant who comes in from her house to book out your car. That took almost an hour.
The return process is even sillier. Write your mileage on a poorly photocopied slip of paper, and drop it on her desk with the keys. No pics. No checkout inspection, just 'trust us not to charge you extra'.
Fortunately I took a ton of pictures including the odometer so when they couldnt do math and tried to charge me an extra 1000 km, I fought back with pics and got those charges dropped. That's the last time I use Budget.
Don't most credit cards provide rental insurance? How is their coverage different (if it is)?
However I was in one a few months ago and got a puncture on a dual carriageway. By the time I pulled over to a safe location the tyre was shredded. No problem, go into the boot to get the spare wheel out and I'll deal with it later.
There was no spare wheel. Just some little device which I assume is supposed to somehow re-inflate the tyre and seal any small holes for a small amount of time. Clearly not going to work when the side wall is shredded from driving the best part of a mile on it.
Too 6 hours for a tow-truck to arrive, pick me up, take me to a local garage, and change the tyre. That cost my employer far more than the cost of a spare wheel -- not to mention the cost of the tow itself being about the same price as the wheel + tyre.
Probably not a slight on Enterprise, as I'm sure it's the same with other hire companies (I hired from Sixt on holiday and it was the same). Why don't cars come with spare wheels any more? Are people really that incompetent they can't change one? Surely punctures as as common now as they were 20 years ago.
I suspect they don't want people stealing/replacing spares in rentals with worn ones[0]. The mere possibility of this adds 1 more thing that has to be inspected and kept track of.
0. I once managed to run down the battery on a U-Haul by keeping the emergency blinkers on(!). I didn't have jumper cables and thought I'd hot-swap it with the one on my car to get it charged: which is how I discovered that batteries in U-Hauls cannot be easily removed. I ended up getting a tow truck to jump-start the U-Haul many hours later.
Not sure if I'm strictly a victim of effective marketing, or if they flipped places in the last however many years, or what, but it's interesting to see your post and the replies that imply I've got it backwards.
They were sold the private equity then taken public in 2006 and the quality of the company declined dramatically over the 2010s.
They changed their model to focus on partnership programs through airlines, hotels, and credit cards while offering low teaser rates for their rentals and upselling addons afterwards.
Performance metrics for their staff shifted from customer satisfaction to sales targets.
They canceled their R&D efforts (like rental kiosks) and refocused that money on marketing campaigns.
Their marketshare and profits declined and as a result activist investor Carl Icahn put pressure on the company to cut costs in 2016, forcing in a new CEO. Those cuts ultimately led to incidents like the one in the original article about falsely reporting the vehicles stolen but also to the company's bankruptcy filing in 2019.
It's been quite the fall from grace for the company.
Filing a false police report is a crime, it would be nice to see that enforced against the company in one way or another.
When I called customer support to deal with the issue, they hung up on me three times. (Typical conversation:
- Sit on hold for 15-45 minutes
- Hello, can I have your rental number?
- 12345-XYZ
- <click>
I told the fourth person I'd be issuing a chargeback and dumping the vehicle in front of the locked gate of their parking lot if they also hung up. They directed us to a location that couldn't accept the vehicle.
We ended up paying for one day rental or something, but at least I didn't go to jail.
As other commenters said, multiple people (probably management, execs) at Hertz should be serving time in federal prison.
I finally got it towed because I said I'd just be forced to abandon it.
In its release, Hertz says they believe “a meaningful portion of the settlement” will be covered by insurance so ‘no big deal’ to them what they did to customers, at least for investors. Meanwhile their CEO shrugs in an included statement saying they “will not always be perfect.”
No way that the insurance company would cover negliance and fraud...
https://atlantablackstar.com/2022/12/04/hertz-false-stolen-c...
California law does not have any sort of "prior use" exception to theft laws. Letting someone use a car in the past does not give them cart blanche to borrow it again without permission in the future.
You ex stole your car. If they police did not do anything, the proper response would be to take your complaint of inaction to Internal Affairs or your local elected representative. And then to take the car back yourself, or to hire a PI to retrieve the car or a lawyer to issue a demand letter for the return of the car.
edit: and if people aren't punished at Hertz, those other car rental companies will see that the money to be made through bad behavior more than makes up for the costs if caught.
It should be a legal requirement that a human review and sign off on any complaint about a stolen car to police. That personal (and company) should be held criminally liable for making false police reports in addition to any civil damages (including significant punitive damages) they should pay.
Someone needs to go to jail.
If a cashier at a fast food restaurant takes $30 from the register, they go to jail. If a company steals millions from their workers paychecks, we slap them with a tiny fine.
So as per example your example the guy who filed the report be sent to jail even though he was following company policy, though in this case made a mistake. How it compares to cash register guy who was clearly stealing.
You fuck up someone's life bad enough and often enough, you just don't get to be a company anymore.
Ok this is horrific, and Hertz should be ashamed of their behavior. Now, we dont have any proof the arrest or jail time caused the miscarriage, but to the extent we believe it did, can we also talk for a minute about why our executive branch/jail system is so hard on people (of both sexes btw) such that physiological distress occurs such as miscarriages or suicides?
It's completely unnecessary, I'd dare say detrimental, to getting rehabilitated.
Some people, whether they notice or not, prefer a world where "others" suffer.
I did notice this aspect of American mentality. Somehow the culture here really seems to feel that retributive justice is justice served.
On the other hand, I am terrified to travel there fearing something like this will happen and I will rot in jail for some Kafkaesque mistake.
I travel a LOT, and there are very few businesses in that industry I hate, Hertz is one of them. My only times using Hertz have all ended in disaster.
while this is indeed 364 too many, this number is still absolutely tiny. there is going to be lots of confirmation bias in this thread -- of bad interactions. whereas the very very large majority of customers are probably happy with hertz. i always have been.
don't get me wrong, someone at hertz should go to jail for this. but your chances of being one of those 364 seems absolutely tiny doesn't it? they must do a billion rentals a year.
Says a lot about law enforcement practices when being wrongly accused by them is considered so terrible, that compensation is 10 years of average income in the country.
"Someone told me to do it" is not an excuse for criminal behaviour, and neither is "We constructed a bureaucracy that results in us engaging in criminal behaviour".
No one important at Wells-Fargo went to jail either - they set policies which were expected to have certain outcomes, but top brass could not have possibly have foreseen the outcomes. I'm sick of plausible deniability, especially when it isn't even plausible any longer, the complaints go back years.
Those customers should obviously get their judgment money, and Hertz should pay a heavy price (maybe even such a heavy price that they go bankrupt), but no one should go to jail for filing a false police report unless they intended to mislead the police.
$1000 insulin only exists because the government has been bought and paid for to create a legal monopoly. This is state violence against people who need life-saving medication.
>Ahead of this, Ma addressed an assembly of high-profile figures with a controversial speech that criticised the Chinese financial system. He was not seen in public again until late January. In the interim, there were rumours that he might have been placed under house arrest or otherwise detained. Some even questioned if he was still alive.
Obviously there are aspects of China you don't want to emulate (eg the ethnic cleansing).
I found it funny when I looked closer and realized that the tire that failed didn't match the other three. I think that particular wheel was cursed since the car only had 26k miles on it.
What should they have done instead? First, inform every employee of a new temporary policy that any report to the police about a customer purely about the theft of a car the customer had rented now has to be approved by a senior lawyer. Second, figure out the scope of the problem and how to fix it. Third, replace that unpleasant temporary policy with something more tailored once you understand what went wrong.
It's ridiculous that corporations can always absolve themselves and their executives of responsibility because "well, who would we punish" or equally spurious arguments.
If you steal $100 from work you go to jail. If work shorts you $100 in pay, your gonna need to get your own lawyer. Citizens are not given the benefit of the doubt against entities that only exist on paper and don’t suffer real consequences. It’s backwards to put it lightly.
I don't know why judges don't insist on jail time for someone in these situations. It might not make sense for a mistake that happened once, but after they knew it was happening and didn't fix their systems, the behavior was knowingly reckless.
Any individual doing what Hertz is doing would be facing prison time.
Yes, they should be held responsible (for some value of "responsible"). It is ultimately their responsibility, which goes along with the power they wield. It's what they signed up for. And this doesn't absolve the people who directly caused the issue. You want leadership to focus on ensuring that their delegates are competent and not corrupt.
There are some shades of gray here, of course. In the US, these leadership positions don't have absolute power. It isn't necessarily their *fault*. But it is absolutely their *responsibility*.
The only reason why we haven't had a president go to jail for crimes committed, at least for one congress has pursued is that the Presidents who were for sure to be removed (Nixon), resigned and was pardoned.
This would be a great argument for abolishing the IRS.
President should be responsible for things he can change, in US a president doesn't really have power to change everything as there are other parts of the government which are involved in decision making.
Any person in a position of power who can CHANGE policies or remove people and doesn't do so, which leads to further incidents and corruption that affect the population should be held accountable.
This will never happen, as powerful people don't want this.
[1] And whether people like it or not, Hertz clearly thought this system worked at the time they reported the "stolen" cars; just like software developers think their buggy code works until the user reports or crash telemetry come back.
They can not claim poor record keeping and ignorance as an excuse for filing false reports, they SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, which is part of the intent standard in most jurisdictions
1, 2, even 10 reports ok... they suck. 100's of false reports, that is beyond simple clerical error it would not take much to convince a jury that intent is there. i.e they internally setup the process that lead to false reports being filed likely as a say to cut costs
Flipping it around: would you feel comfortable calling the police to report that criminal negligence? Or would you be worried about getting in trouble for a false report?
The system is tilted towards non-prosecution, and for some very good reasons. No one's going to jail here.
Maybe it was a "bureaucratic error" that fraudulently reported the cars as stolen. That bureaucracy didn't spontaneously emerge from dust. Humans built it.
Why should humans not face legal repercussions for the havoc they've wreaked on their victims' lives?
Declaring a car stolen by mistake shouldnt be the end of the world. One day someone with the same name as me committed an offense and I was wrongly given to the police of my country, and it took 5 minutes to clear me and nothing happened.
> A Hertz spokesperson told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2020 that the company has no “mechanism” to withdraw reports and does not do so because “In the rare instances this happens, if you report a crime, and you later say it didn’t happen, then law enforcement tends not to believe you if you retract it or say you were mistaken,” the spokesperson said. “Hertz’s continued good relationship with law enforcement is important.” [0]
It seems like there is plenty of intent there. The intent to continue lieing to police to protect Hertz's reputation at severe cost to Hertz's victims.
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2022/04/11/hertz-stolen...
That's great that worked well for you, but in America, I don't have enough faith in cops for that to work out.
The prevailing attitude is that cops have to be "tough on crime", and if some false positives end up happening and an innocent person goes to jail for a few days until their name gets cleared, that's fine. In the mean time, they'll try to find SOMETHING to charge them with.
Land of the free, indeed.
(Speeders, drunk drivers and violently abusive parents rarely intend to kill people but we still have laws on the books to treat such cases adequately.)
This is a settlement, not a judgement.
>The system is tilted towards non-prosecution, and for some very good reasons. No one's going to jail here.
yes for high profile corporate execs it is, if some Teenager reported his car stolen but then found out a friend borrowed it, not only would the teen reporting the crime go to jail, but the teen that borrowed it likely would still be prosecuted for theft at the same time
Kinda like "resisting arrest" charge that is still valid even when there is no underlying crime to resist arrest from....
Your idea of " system is tilted towards non-prosecution" only exisit for one socio-economic class of citizens
1. Would a Reasonable person believe the system would lead to false reports
2. Were there any engineers or people internal to the company raising concerns that were ignored by managers / executives (I believe there likely was and there is more than enough probable cause for police to get a search warrant to find out)
3. After the first reports came in what actions were taken by the company
Are you able to find the source of that quote? It’s so outrageous, and is so not something that a corporate spokesperson would say, that I wonder if it’s somehow been taken out of context. Or if it even happened.
> Hertz has no mechanism to withdraw a criminal referral because, the company spokesperson said, it has to maintain a relationship of “integrity and responsibility” with law enforcement
Aug 4th: https://web.archive.org/web/20200804074215/https://www.inqui...
Aug 6th: https://web.archive.org/web/20200806004611/https://www.inqui...
The original version of the article did have the fuller quote:
> Hertz has no mechanism to withdraw a criminal referral because, the company spokesperson said, it has to maintain a relationship of “integrity and responsibility” with law enforcement.
> “In the rare instances this happens, if you report a crime, and you later say it didn’t happen, then law enforcement tends not to believe you if you retract it or say you were mistaken,” the spokesperson said. “Hertz’s continued good relationship with law enforcement is important.”
To be blunt: be real. No one at Hertz is going to jail over this. They fucked up, and have admitted so as part of this settlement. That's all the justice you're going to get. I'm sorry.
your real world does not match mine, because in my world corp execs routinely ignore the advice of engineers, administrators, and developers when it comes to things like Security....
Unless it was done wilfully, this just perpetuates the American fetish for imprisonment. They should be fired. They should be fined. And they should be deeply investigated, to confirm there wasn’t intent.
Throwing people in jail for literally throwing innocent people in jail, destroying their careers, and stripping them of their basic human rights is far from fetishizing it.
Letting people get away with crimes simply because they're part of a corporation is simply stupid.
Justice should focus first on making victims whole, then on rehabilitating the perpetrators to prevent victimization in the future. Imprisonment serves neither of those goals.
This isn't a matter of teaching the executives of Hertz that no, they don't need to commit crimes to survive, and how to access alternative means of survival, and all that.
They did this because they were greedy, lazy, and they knew they wouldn't suffer much for it. When you're dealing with white-collar sorts of crimes like this, deterrence is a thing.
There are plenty of alternatives that don't involve locking people in cells - and that are probably more effective a deterrent.
It doesn't help past victims, it helps future victims. Turns out, people do things that hurt other people if it will 1) benefit them and has 2) never resulted in any consequences.
> People have some really fucked up ideas of justice.
That people who have harmed other people face imprisonment is not one of them.
> rehabilitating the perpetrators to prevent victimization in the future.
Will this be done with a magic wand?
Or phrased differently: without prison sentences the whole situation becomes a pure numbers game: did they get more money out of the false reports/not fixing the bugs causing this misbehavior then they now have to pay in damages.
These kinds of crimes will continue to become the baseline if there are no real consequences to the people actually being responsible for the deeds (this includes the CEO).
The perpetrators are the employees at Hertz that made the decision. Issuing a fine to the company does not rehabilitate or penalize the decision makers.
What else do you do, make them pay a fine that's just a rounding error on their checking account? Having them wear orange instead of pinstripes for a similar number of days will get their full, undivided attention.
Sending people to prison for committing crimes is "fucked up"? We can quibble over which crimes deserve what sentence, but we shouldn't outright dismiss the possibility of imprisoning white collar criminals.
Unironically, yes. Prison is super fucked up.
Prison time barely acts as a deterrent. It doesn't reform criminals. It has high costs for taxpayers.
American prisons are entirely inhumane. Even heard of prison rape? Even violent criminals shouldn't have to endure what goes down in there. With modern technology, house arrest is far better.
Even for extremely violent criminals who are a existent danger, prison is not right. They should be in mental hospitals.
I see where you're coming from in general, but the standard for non corporate executives is imprisonment. Even if it's a "fucked up idea", it's the status quo.
Arguing against imprisonment in the context of corporate criminals doesn't do anything to change that status quo. Rather it just helps perpetuate the dual class justice system where the upper class gets respect and treated like humans while the faceless lower class gets draconian sentences to be "tough on crime".
Retribution: punish the offender. In the state of nature, if someone offended against you, you could hurt or kill them. Now, the state has a sanitized responsibility to fill that role.
Rehabilitation: give the offender time to think about and learn from his offense.
Isolation: remove the person from society for a while so that if rehabilitation fails, society is still relieved from having to deal with the offender’s misbehavior for a time.
Disincentivization: give others an idea of what would happen if they were caught doing a similar offense.
None of these overlap with “making the victim whole,” which is probably why there is a whole separate system of civil law for that which has nothing to do with punishment (excluding, of course, exemplary damages).
If you think there is no excuse for incarceration, then I’m curious how you’d propose handling the problems of sanitized retribution, isolation, and disincentive for crime. It seems pretty obvious (to me) that the world would be pretty gnarly if unrehabilitated criminals lurked among us, free to perpetrate crimes until an angry victim killed them just because they made a business decision that their crimes outweighed the civil penalty, and would be criminals saw this behavior and got the idea that it would be good for them to emulate the successful, unpunished offenders.
That said, a focus on rehabilitation for those who are deemed possible to rehabilitate seems reasonable to me.
b) deterrence is important, especially in cases like this: if there are consequences for willfully ignoring something that causes severe harm to others, it's less likely to be willfully ignored in the future. If you can expect to only have to make others whole (if caught), it's a lot easier to just not care. And legal compensation rarely actually makes people whole.
Guess which ones get taken a lot more seriously.
I am sorry if your false report causes someone to go to jail, then you need to go to jail as well
People pay tons of money to avoid prison, even temporarily - see lawyers, bail, etc. Same goes for getting prison sentences reduced, even just in part, to house arrest and probation.
Just what amount of fines, house arrest, and probation is going to be more effective a deterrent than prison?
I think there's a reasonable discussion to be had about where the line is between 'enough' deterrence and excessive punishment, but it's a bit absurd to claim that things people happily accept in lieu of going to prison will be more of a deterrent than prison.
So, prison. Maybe a slightly nicer prison, but you're still taking their freedom away.
Meanwhile we do the equivalent of charging a $90 penalty for a crime that earned $100.
>"A Hertz spokesperson, who asked not to be identified, said that payments or even the eventual recovery of the car did not wipe away what it views as the original theft."
That is bizarre. I am a reporter; I cover news. The spokespeople of major corporations don't request anonymity. Anonymity is reserved for sensitive sources. It's literally the job of a spokesperson to speak on behalf of a company. They don't seek anonymity.
The second version of the article doesn't include the statement that Hertz's spokesperson requested anonymity. Which makes me think that the original source was either not a spokesperson at all, or that they might have been speaking without authorization.
The comment is still weird, but in the context of that article, Hertz doesn't come across that poorly, IMO. If you rent a car, and the rental company asks that it be returned after your rental period is over, going to the point of calling you multiple times, sending you letters, sending you a letter via Certified Mail, and finally trying to repo the car — all before reporting the car as stolen... well... that's kind of on you when the car is subsequently reported as stolen. Even if you kept paying for it. No? People don't have the right to unilaterally extend their rental period. According to Hertz, in 100% of cases, they did all of the above prior to reporting vehicles as stolen.
> Saleema Lovelace, who was arrested at gunpoint two days before the date on which she had agreed to return her rental car to Hertz.
> Connie Totman, who rented a car from Hertz in South Carolina and returned the car in Georgia. Hertz subsequently overcharged Ms. Totman in error and falsely reported the vehicle as stolen to South Carolina police.
In the latter case they reported the car as stolen after it had already been returned! The mind boggles.
Don't worry, that happens. Hertz will not hesitate to call you, saying that the credit card used for the rental has been maxed out, and could you supply a different credit card.
Always keep your receipts.
On what authority are you making this proclamation?
The punishment of prison should be entirely limited to losing your independence and the dignity that comes with it. It should literally be like childhood "time out". These are still human beings and we owe it to them to treat them like people, they just need to be silo'd off from society for a bit sometimes.
What? Why aren't career criminals more brazen in their acts, if not for fear of punishment (which means: prison)?
I totally get the point that you can't just increase the prison sentence and expect the deterrence to scale, but suggesting that punishment "barely acts as a deterrent" sounds insane, especially when we're talking about calculating criminals like Hertz executives. It's not like they have the uncontrollable urge to make false police reports because of some weird psychological defect.
Those are all nice-to-haves, but justice is an equal exchange of bad things done by you to bad things done to you.