Hertz Ordered To Tell Court How Many Thousands Of Renters It Falsely Accuses Of Theft Every Year
from the oh-well-it's-just-customers-whose-money-we-already-have dept
It all started with Hertz being less than helpful when a man was falsely accused of murder. Michigan resident Herbert Alford was arrested and convicted for a murder he didn't commit. He maintained his innocence, claiming he was at the airport in Lansing, Michigan during the time the murder occurred. And he could have proven it, too, if he had just been able to produce the receipt showing he had been renting a car at Hertz twenty minutes away from the crime scene.
It wasn't until Alford had spent five years in prison that Hertz got around to producing the receipt. Three of those years can be laid directly at Hertz's feet. The receipt was requested in 2015. Hertz handed it over in 2018. Alford sued.
That's not the only lawsuit Hertz is facing. It apparently also has a bad habit of accusing paying customers of theft, something that has resulted in drivers being accosted by armed officers and/or arrested and charged.
Nine months later, another lawsuit rolled in. A proposed class action suit -- covering more than 100 Hertz customers -- claimed the company acts carelessly and engages in supremely poor recordkeeping. The lawsuit, (then) representing 165 customers, contains details of several customers who have been pulled over, arrested, and/or jailed because Hertz's rental tracking system is buggier than its competitors'. Hertz takes pain to point out these incidents only represent a very small percentage of its renters. But that's essentially meaningless when this small error rate doesn't appear to occur at other car rental agencies.
This lawsuit is forcing Hertz to disclose exactly what this error rate is and how many renters it affects. It's a much larger number than the 165 customers the lawsuit started with last November.
In a ruling Wednesday, a federal judge in Delaware sided with the request from attorneys for 230 customers who say they were wrongly arrested.
The total still depends on whom you ask. Hertz said it reports to police 0.014% of its 25 million annual rental transactions - or 3,500 customers. Attorneys for the renters said they believe the number is closer to 8,000.
It may look like only a rounding error to Hertz, but each of these 3,500-8,000 incorrect reports represents a possible loss of liberty, if not a possible loss of life. Law enforcement officers treat auto thieves as dangerous criminals. Being falsely accused by a rental company's software doesn't alter the threat matrix until long after the guns have been drawn.
Sometimes the problem has a human component. If a rental agent does not see a vehicle they thought was returned, they may file a report. And when humans aren't involved, it's Hertz's computer system doing the dirty work.
Other times, [the attorney representing Hertz customers, France Malofiy] said, the confusion is caused by a customer swapping cars during their rental period or extending the time frame. If the credit or debit card charge fails to process correctly, he said Hertz's system generates a theft report.
Malofiy said the company does not update its police reports if a payment ultimately processes - leaving customers to flounder in the criminal justice system. In 2020, a spokesperson for Hertz told the Philadelphia Inquirer that a stolen-vehicle report "was valid when it was made" and that it was "up to law enforcement to decide what to do with the case."
And there's another data point to add to Hertz's perhaps inadvertent but very fucking real infliction of misery on thousands of renters every year. A man who has spent over $15,000 with Hertz since 2020 is currently sitting in jail thanks to yet another bogus Hertz theft alert.
All of this is at odds with Hertz's repeated claim it only issues stolen vehicle notices to law enforcement following "extensive investigations." If it did actually engage in thorough investigations of every generated theft report, it would not be currently facing a lawsuit from hundreds of drivers who've been arrested and jailed over bogus theft allegations. And the problem it claims isn't really a problem wouldn't still be getting people locked up for crimes they didn't commit.
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Filed Under: false accusations, rental cars, theft
Companies: hertz
Reader Comments
The First Word
“Manual Review
One of the frustrations of the copyright system is that automated systems get blamed for filing false claims. But I can't believe that Hertz is somehow using an automated system to file stolen vehicle reports with the police. I say the person(s) who signed the affidavits needs to be charged with filing a false police report.
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Hertz: Because that's what using the company feels like
Hertz said it reports to police 0.014% of its 25 million annual rental transactions - or 3,500 customers.
Just... let that sink it. Being almost certainly very generous let's knock that down to 10% incorrect reports,with a full 90% actually valid reports filled to the police, that would still be 350 customers that the company is willing to throw to the wolves by negligently filing bogus claims of car theft, and if they can't be bothered to look up a report of a man accused of murder for several years the idea that they'd put more effort for those they accuse of much less becomes downright laughable.
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Non-Fuzzy Math
I'm not that great at math, but I believe that Hertz's 0.014% chance of getting me tossed in the pokey, while it might be described by some as infinitesimal, is still infinitely higher than the rest of the rental industry's combined 0.000%. So guess where I'm not renting a car ever.
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This is what you get for choosing the company that has a murderer as their spokesman.
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Hertz gets you through the airport with time to kill
In all fairness, the man was found innocent. If the gove don't fit, you must acquit!
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Re:
Wasn't that Avis that he shilled for back in the day?
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Re: Re:
Hertz.
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Manual Review
One of the frustrations of the copyright system is that automated systems get blamed for filing false claims. But I can't believe that Hertz is somehow using an automated system to file stolen vehicle reports with the police. I say the person(s) who signed the affidavits needs to be charged with filing a false police report.
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Working hand in gove.
Can I use that of the current Secretary of State for Levelling Housing and Communities? :-)
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Re: You can make it stop anytime
Bravely bold Sir Koby
Rode forth from the Internet.
He was not afraid to die,
Oh brave Sir koby.
He was not at all afraid
To be killed in nasty ways.
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Koby.
He was not in the least bit scared
To be mashed into a pulp.
Or to have his eyes gouged out,
And his elbows broken.
To have his kneecaps split
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Re: Re: You can make it stop anytime
I'll type some hot-garbage into the comments here @ TechDirt from time to time, often using a nomdeplume aka Deputy Dickwad, but what is it that you are trying to say via your poor poetry?
Or are you a bot?
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Re:
It definitely hurts to use Hertz
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Is that really a valid legal position?
Oh, that's not the guy who murdered my child. Well, whatever, cops will sort it out.
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Re: Re: Re: Now you too may skedaddle off my lawn
You young-in's just don't respect the classics.
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Re: Manual Review
This.
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Re:
Regardless of legality, it is more common than many might think. Someone reports, say, something as being stolen. Cops find someone to pin it on, in the meantime the person who reported it realises they just lost the thing or whatever, don't bother to fill the cops in. Cops go ahead with the case, unaware.
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Re:
'We thought one of our cars was stolen, accused one of our customers of stealing it and couldn't be bothered to correct that when we found out it was merely our system not working correctly' does not a valid excuse make, no.
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Re: Re: Re: You can make it stop anytime
It's based on one of the 'Sir Robin' songs from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
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So "extensive investigations" (whatever that means in Hertz's policy manual) leads to 3500 police reports a year. Going with a prior commenter's very generous assumption, let's assume only 10% of those are fraudulent. How many fraudulent police reports would Hertz be filing if they didn't "extensive[ly] investigate" before filing? How often does Hertz mishandle vehicle accounting, and only the extensive investigation catches the mistake before notifying the police?
I suspect "extensive investigation" in this context only means that they double-check that their very lax criteria are satisfied. =>
=> Good enough. File a police report.
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Re: Re:
Cops and detectives and prosecutors like wins not the actual truth. The system is predatory and stupid shite like this feeds it.
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Wait? A car rental company is doing something shady?
No, go on. Seriously? I mean, after all there are such controls in place that make it accountable so why SHOULD it act like a good citizen?
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Publicity
Anyone still want to claim there's no such thing as bad publicity?
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Re: Re: You can make it stop anytime
You realize the poem falls flat this time, since what Koby said this time, at least, is actually on the mark?
You've got to be able to agree with people you don't like when they are right, and keep the mockery switch off in those cases. Otherwise, you fall into the same behavior as those who would make policy decisions just because it "Makes the libs cry"
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Re: Re:
It depends, I think.If they swapped the car, and the system did not report that correctly, then yes that is not valid excuse, and their statement is false.
If someone overstayed their rental, then the car is technically stolen ("possessed by someone who is not the owner, without legal cause or the owner's consent"). So, the initial police report (and their statement) is valid; that said, they should retract said police report if they regain the car (and implement a grace period for police reports).
Though I wonder, how difficult is it to retract a police report, compared to making one?
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Re: Re: Re: Missing the forest for the shrubberies
K-dawg gets a new line of the song every time he posts until he answers just a single question. Doesn't matter what that coward says unless hes decided to stop running away like a bitch.
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