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.

Filed Under: false accusations, rental cars, theft
Companies: hertz

More Than 100 Hertz Customers Are Suing The Company For Falsely Reporting Rented Vehicles As Stolen

from the welcome-to-the-Hertz-Locker dept

Earlier this year, a man, wrongfully arrested and imprisoned for murder, was finally able to prove his innocence by producing rental car receipts showing he could not have possibly committed the crime. When the murder occurred, Herbert Alford was twenty minutes away from the scene of the crime, renting a car from Hertz.

He requested this exculpatory evidence from Hertz, but it took the company three years to locate the receipts that proved his innocence. All told, Alford spent five years in jail on the bogus charge. Hertz apologized for spending more than 1,000 days "searching" for the rental records, but that apology doesn't put years back on Alford's life, a half-decade of which he lost to the penal system for a crime he didn't commit.

This isn't Hertz's only problem. The company is apparently pretty lax when it comes to record-keeping, which has resulted in people being accosted -- often at gunpoint -- by police officers who've been (wrongly) informed the rental car they've pulled over is stolen. The proliferation of automatic license plate readers means these stops will only become more frequent as time goes on, as hotlists hit cameras capable of collecting millions of plate/location records a year. And that proliferation comes with a cost: the potential killing of innocent people because law enforcement has been misinformed about the status of a rented car.

Hertz is apparently still trying to get people killed. As it emerges from bankruptcy, it is facing lawsuits over its potentially deadly mistakes. The company is still sending out hotlists to law enforcement, misinforming armed officers that legally-rented vehicles are actually stolen. This appears to be a long-running problem for the rental agency.

In March 2019, KATV reported that a man from Searcy had filed suit against the company after it falsely reported that a rental car had been stolen. In May 2020, Francis Alexander Malofiy, an attorney out of Pennsylvania with clients in Arkansas, filed cases against the company. The following day Hertz filed for bankruptcy.

That's KATV's update on some older cases. Its latest story deals with another falsely accused customer who's now suing the company. Dozens of Hertz customers were interviewed. Many of them are currently seeking compensation via the company's bankruptcy proceedings.

Some excerpts from those interviews:

“I was incarcerated for seven months because of Hertz, it’s not fair in the least especially when you have a receipt saying I paid you. Hertz I paid you $2,300,” said Julius Burnside.

“The police man said you stole the car and I said it’s a rental car –it’s from my company and they handle everything, I just go pick it up,” Nancy Cullen-Smits said.

“The police officer asked for my driver’s license and then when he runs my license, he says there is a warrant out for your arrest for a Hertz vehicle that was stolen,” said Michelle Jones. “I informed them I returned a Hertz vehicle two months ago and paid them $2,000 but I didn’t steal it.”

Another man who was engaged in a long-term lease contract with Hertz suffered a similar fate: a wrongful accusation and the destruction of his life by the criminal justice system.

Hanna “John” Ayoub is one of those former customers. He rented a truck in April 2019 from the Hertz Car Rental office at the Wilmington train station, a transaction that eventually turned into him being jailed for months before criminal charges against him were dropped, he said.

“I lost everything, my life, my reputation, everything,” said Ayoub, who spent some three months incarcerated after being charged with stealing the truck he had rented from Hertz, according to court documents.

Here's another of the 165 claimants attempting to have Hertz belatedly right the wrongs its perpetrated against some of its customers.

One of the claimants, James Tolen, said a surprise traffic stop in Houston late last year turned into a frightening police encounter that made him fear for his life. After completing a project for one of the customers at his renovation company, Tolen was heading home Dec. 23 in a pickup truck rented from Hertz.

He and his fiancée, Krystal Carter, who is also a claimant, say they had rented from Hertz about a dozen times last year — but that didn't prevent him from being stopped by police for driving a car reported stolen by the company. Around 10 p.m. that night, police pulled him over and ordered him out of the car over a loudspeaker, telling him to lift his shirt and back up toward them.

"As I turn around, I see both officers train the guns on me," Tolen told CBS News' Consumer Investigative Correspondent Anna Werner.

"It was just terrifying. It was bad. Actually, I was really thinking that I wasn't gonna make it home," he said.

Tolen, like others suing Hertz, said officers told him he was driving a stolen vehicle -- a claim they made based on bad information from the rental company. Tolen managed to escape this with his life, liberty, and livelihood intact, however. It was the cops that were pissed off when Tolen showed them his rental paperwork.

Tolen begged the officers to look at his rental contract, in which he says he was listed as an authorized driver. He says after seeing the document, one of the officers called Hertz and told the company it needed to get a better system.

Hertz rents to millions of people without incident every year. But even though this only happens to what's likely a rounding error percentage-wise, it's still unacceptable. Mistakenly claiming someone has stolen a vehicle can lead to -- at the very least -- a potentially dangerous traffic stop where the truly innocent are confronted by people authorized to use deadly force and who, for the most part, assume genuine confusion is actually criminal evasion and react accordingly. Even if the outcome isn't deadly, it can still destroy lives by feeding innocent drivers into a legal system built on the presumption of innocence but tends to ignore that fact once someone is accused of a crime.

Hertz claims this is just a bunch of scofflaws misrepresenting the inevitable outcomes of their own bad faith efforts.

"Unfortunately, in the legal matters being discussed, the attorneys have a track record of making baseless claims that blatantly misrepresent the facts," the company said. "The vast majority of these cases involve renters who were many weeks or even months overdue returning vehicles and who stopped communicating with us well beyond the scheduled due date. Situations where vehicles are reported to the authorities are very rare and happen only after exhaustive attempts to reach the customer."

A bunch of sworn affidavits say otherwise. If the company really wants to wade into discovery, it's probably going to expose some shoddy recordkeeping it would rather keep hidden from current and potential customers. That this has happened so often says something specific about Hertz. No other rental company is facing similar lawsuits so it's not speculative to infer Hertz has some internal issues that need to be addressed as it attempts to move back to profitability, if not respectability.

Filed Under: car theft, record keeping, rental cars, wrongful arrest
Companies: hertz

EU Says That, No, Rental Car Companies Don't Need To Pay A License To Rent Cars With Radios That Might Play Music

from the copyright-insanity dept

Performance Rights Organizations (PROs), sometimes known as "Collection Societies," have a long history of demanding licensing for just about every damn thing. That's why there was just some confusion about whether or not those with musical talents would even be allowed to perform from their balconies while in COVID-19 lockdown. And if you thought that it was crazy that anyone would even worry about things like that, it's because you haven't spent years following the crazy demands made by PROs, including demanding a license for a woman in a grocery store singing while stocking the shelves, a public performance license for having the radio on in a horse stable (for the horses), or claiming that your ringtone needs a separate "public performance" license, or saying that hotels that have radios in their rooms should pay a public performance license.

Five years ago, we wrote about another such crazy demand -- a PRO in Sweden demanding that rental car companies pay a performance license because their cars had radios, and since "the public" could rent their cards and listen to the radio, that constituted "a communication to the public" that required a separate license. The case has bounced around the courts, and finally up to the Court of Justice for the EU which has now, finally, ruled that merely renting cars does not constitute "communication to the public."

From the CJEU's press release:

... the Court of Justice, in its judgment delivered today, held that it is the case of the supply of a radio receiver forming an integral part of a hired motor vehicle, which makes it possible to receive, without any additional intervention by the leasing company, the terrestrial radio broadcasts available in the area in which the vehicle is located. That therefore differs from acts of communication by which service providers intentionally broadcast protected works to their clientele, by distributing a signal by means of receivers that they have installed in their establishment.

Basically, people aren't renting cars for the purpose of listening to music, and it's not like the rental car company is creating some special musical offering. They're just renting cars. Which have radios. Which might play music. If a customer turns it on and tunes into a radio station. And thus, finally, years later, we are assured that renting cars is not "communicating [music] to the public" for which the rental car company must pay extra.

But just the fact that this spent half a decade in court should give you an idea of just how greedy and messed up the copyright world is, with the various PROs/Collection Societies leading the way down the most ridiculous path.

Filed Under: cjeu, collection societies, communication to the public, copyright, eu, performance rights, pros, public performance, radios, rental cars

Hertz Puts Video Cameras Inside Its Rental Cars, Has 'No Current Plans' To Use Them

from the no,-really,-it's-not-switched-on-yet dept

Last week we wrote about the hypothetical situation of CCTV cameras being installed in every home. It turns out that this particular dystopia is closer than we thought: an article by Kashmir Hill on the Fusion site passes on the news that Hertz is putting cameras inside its rental cars as part of its "NeverLost" navigational system:

Hertz has offered the NeverLost navigational device for years, but it only added the built-in camera feature (which includes audio and video) to its latest version of the device -- NeverLost 6 -- in mid-2014. "Approximately a quarter of our vehicles across the country have a NeverLost unit and slightly more than half of those vehicles have the NeverLost 6 model installed,” Hertz spokesperson Evelin Imperatrice said by email. In other words, one in 8 Hertz cars has a camera inside -- but Imperatrice says that, for now, they are inactive. "We do not have adequate bandwidth capabilities to the car to support streaming video at this time," she said.

So why did it install them?

"Hertz added the camera as a feature of the NeverLost 6 in the event it was decided, in the future, to activate live agent connectivity to customers by video. In that plan the customer would have needed to turn on the camera by pushing a button (while stationary)," Imperatrice explained. "The camera feature has not been launched, cannot be operated and we have no current plans to do so."

But of course, Hertz would hardly go to the trouble and expense of fitting its cars with this feature unless, at some future point, it did plan to use them. Morever, that future use might go well beyond "live agent connectivity", as Hill rightly points out:

you could imagine camera mission creep, such as Hertz using it to capture video of what a trouble renter is up to in the vehicle, or to see who is really driving the car, or to snoop on a singing -- or snuggling -- driver.

According to the Fusion article, Hertz doesn't seem to be telling anyone about the camera, on the grounds that the company doesn't plan to use it, and so there's nothing for customers to know. But if and when it does announce its presence, there will be precisely the problem Techdirt mentioned last week: that people in front of it would naturally be worried they were being spied upon -- even if assured to the contrary -- and would start constraining their speech and behavior.

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Filed Under: rental cars, video cameras
Companies: hertz