More Horror Stories About Hertz’s False Theft Accusations Pile Up As Class Action Suit Moves Forward

Legal Issues

from the where-valued-customers-are-rewarded-with-lengthy-jail-time! dept

Hertz rents cars, like many of its competitors do. What separates Hertz from the rental car pack is its willingness to let law enforcement perform its collection work by filing criminal charges against people. Maybe some people prefer a tough-on-crime rental agency, but it’s unlikely any of Hertz’s falsely accused customers choose Hertz for its unique ability to have renters imprisoned.

After years of false allegations, the company is being sued by the people it has helped wrongfully imprison. Late last year, a class action suit representing about 100 renters was filed. Since then, more allegations have surfaced and more plaintiffs have been added to the suit.

The company has been ordered to tell the court how many times it accuses renters of theft. It has responded with a low ball estimate of around 3,500 police reports a year: 0.014% of its customer base. Those suing say it’s likely double the reported amount, which would still be a very small percentage of renters.

But a percentage that looks like a rounding error still means the company possibly falsely forwards theft allegations to law enforcement that affect thousands of people every year. And even if it’s a very small percentage (roughly 0.030% of renters, if we believe the plaintiffs), its still thousands more than are generated by any of Hertz’s competitors.

And Hertz has been less than contrite about the lives it has destroyed by outsourcing its collection efforts to people with uniforms, badges, guns, and access to a justice system that tends to see accusations as inherently trustworthy, especially when cops are involved.

The very human cost of Hertz’s refusal to perform in-house due diligence and its willingness to offset the cost of vehicle recovery to taxpayers has a very human cost. The attorney (Frances Malofiy) heading up the class action lawsuit has created an online repository of horror stories from customers Hertz has falsely accused of theft.

NBC affiliate 13WTHR has compiled several of these in its report on the lawsuit and the victims of Hertz’s extremely questionable vehicle recovery activities.

It opens with a Colorado man being accosted by CBP officers at the Denver International Airport over a bogus theft report filed by Hertz. Rather than heading to Mexico to celebrate his daughter’s high school graduation, Drew Seaser was subjected to this:

As Seaser and his family got ready to board their flight to Cabo San Lucas, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent asked to see his identification.

“So we handed him my passport. He [said], ‘Mr Seaser, are you aware there is a warrant for your arrest out of Georgia?’ I was like, ‘No, I’ve never been to Georgia,’” Seaser recalled. “I couldn’t believe it. I thought someone was joking.”

It was no joke.

Sheriff’s deputies arrested the Colorado father in front of his wife and children in the middle of the airport and took him to the Denver County jail.

This ended up being a case of identity fraud. Seaser’s credentials were used to rent a car in his name in a state he’d never been in. You may think it lets Hertz off the hook, but apparently the company never bothered to verify the driver’s license number of the fraudster, which did not match the real Drew Seaser’s. Because of that, Seaser spent a night in jail and was unable to take his family on their planned celebratory trip.

Is a night in jail a minor inconvenience? Hertz appears to believe that’s the case. It continues to claim only a small percentage of people are subjected to the end results of false reports, which often begin with guns-out traffic stops and end with someone being jailed until they can clear their name. Seaser’s case took a little more than 24 hours. For others, the ordeal was much, much longer.

Julius Burnside rented a Hertz car in Georgia, then paid for an extension. Despite having a receipt showing he paid for all of it, Burnside claims Hertz reported the car stolen, erased his extensions, backdated the due date of his rental and told police he had not extended or paid. After 7 months in jail, Burnside accepted a plea deal to get out. He later fought to have the guilty plea withdrawn and prosecutors dropped all charges.

Seven months in this case. Three-and-a-half months in jail in another. A few days in jail for a mother whose child was placed in “protective custody” until she could clear her name. Fourteen days for a Hertz “President’s Club” member whose years of loyalty meant nothing when Hertz screwed up his rental paperwork. 171 days in jail for a report filed by the company, something that led to the pregnant mother’s miscarriage while falsely imprisoned.

And even when cops take Hertz reports with a grain of salt, bad things still happen. Kevin Barkal had a car rented for him by his insurance company while his car was being repaired. Despite not being directly involved in the rental, Hertz decided Barkal needed to be arrested when his possession of the vehicle apparently exceeded the rental agreement he had nothing to do with.

Hertz has multiple excuses for the bullshit chain of events that followed this third-party rental.

A manager at the Hertz lot in Highland, Ind. confirmed that Barkal’s rented 2019 Chevy Impala was coordinated through the insurance company and that he never signed a rental contract. But that rental car manager, Jeffrey Williams, insists Barkal’s rental car was more than a month overdue. Williams told 13News that both he and his staff made multiple attempts to contact Barkal to bring the Impala back to the lot.

“I personally went to the house and left a note on the mailbox, at the front door, the back door. And I put a note on the car to please contact Hertz immediately. [He] never did,” Williams explained. “He took the car and didn’t bring it back. It’s that simple.”

Despite Hertz knowing exactly where the car was located at all times (via the built-in OnStar GPS), it never made an attempt to recover the car. Instead, it filed a report with the local police department. According to the Hertz rep interviewed by the NBC affiliate, Hertz management told him to get law enforcement involved rather than just try to have the car towed back to Hertz.

After a traffic stop, the vehicle the insurance company had rented on Barkal’s behalf was towed and impounded. After some back-and-forth with Hertz, the local cops placed this note in Barkal’s file.

A Highland Police Department detective wrote in his original investigation notes, “Due to the ongoing issue with Hertz’s company policy of not allowing employees to properly identify customers before renting them a vehicle, this case will be closed out. If the vehicle is located, it can simply be towed at Hertz’s expense and removed from [the National Crime Information Center stolen vehicle database].”

That should have been the end of it. Law enforcement was on notice that Hertz was outsourcing its vehicle recovery efforts and that the company preferred to bypass due diligence in favor of letting taxpayers cover the costs of recovering allegedly stolen cars.

Nine months after this incident was stopped, an investigation began again, following Hertz’s insistence the theft investigation should be reopened and criminal charges pursued. Barkal was again pulled over (this time in his own car), arrested, charged with two felonies, and spent a day in jail and thousands of his own funds fighting the bogus criminal charges.

Hertz wants America to return to a simpler time — perhaps one predating the American Revolution. Here’s the class action suit’s lead attorney:

“Even if the car was returned late, it doesn’t make it OK for Hertz to convert a civil payment dispute into a criminal matter,” Malofiy said. “We don’t have debtor’s prisons in this country. But Hertz deliberately would rather use the police as a taxpayer-funded repo service and throw people in jail instead of hiring its own people to retrieve a car. They shift the burden to taxpayers, to police and prosecutors so it doesn’t cost them a dime. No other company in the United States files unverified false police reports against their very own customers like this.”

Yet again, Hertz has responded to requests for comments with its usual line: the false arrests and destruction of renters’ lives only represents a very small percentage of its rental contracts. But what Hertz has consistently refused to explain is how this sort of thing only happens to Hertz renters, despite the company having several competitors in the same market who handle millions of rentals a year (including ones that involve unreturned cars) without getting their customers wrongfully arrested and/or jailed.

The only explanation is the one Hertz doesn’t want to give: it wants to save money by cutting corners on due diligence and allowing the public to fund its vehicle recovery efforts — something no other company does.

Filed Under: rental cars, reporting theft, theft
Companies: hertz