Today in America’s worst companies

Hertz files so many false theft reports that some police departments have stopped taking their calls:

Paula Murray wasn’t thinking about the car she’d rented from Hertz in 2016 when she walked into a State Police station in January of 2021 to finalize her new job as a dispatcher.

She’d filled out the paperwork for the required background check without hesitation. She’d even brought her grandchildren along to see her launch her new career.

Instead, the children watched their grandmother be handcuffed; arrested for allegedly stealing a car she’d in fact returned to Hertz five years earlier.

The job offer was gone and Murray spent the next three months trying to get answers from the car rental company, headquartered in Estero, Florida, before her charges were dismissed on March 30.

She’s now one of 230 plaintiffs suing Hertz for false arrest and in some cases prosecution. The lawyers for this cohort say they know there are more cases out there – warrants for arrest that people who rented from Hertz years ago don’t even know exist, like ticking time bombs waiting to explode their lives at any moment.

In recently unsealed court documents, Hertz admitted it files an average of 3,365 police reports about stolen vehicles involving its customers each year. That means over the past seven years since false theft report cases have been known to occur, theft charges have been levied against more than 23,000 people. How many of them were innocent paying customers is unknown.

[…]

The lawsuits against Hertz allege a pattern of missing inventory in which Hertz, instead of conducting internal investigations to locate vehicles or correct records, files police reports immediately and pushes the issue to the courts.

“They have a head office in Oklahoma City who’s basically not doing any investigation at the local level when a car is lost, misplaced, can’t be found,” Malofiy said. “It’s reported as stolen and they shift the costs of their inventory control to the police and to the prosecutors, which in the end is a taxpayer-funded repo service.”

During a lawsuit in Philadelphia in 2017, before the Hertz bankruptcy, Hertz’s national vehicle control supervisor took the stand and admitted on cross-examination that police reports do not always contain accurate payment information, contacts with customers, and that Hertz does not correct or supplement reports that it knows are false or misleading.

“Hertz is on record as saying that even when they learn information (in police reports) is inaccurate, they refused to correct it because it would hurt their relationship with the police and the police will no longer take their false police reports,” Malofiy said.

Court records show that police at the Indianapolis and Louisville airports did just that. After multiple reports of stolen vehicles that ended up being located on Hertz’s lots, those agencies reportedly said they wouldn’t take new reports from the company.

USA TODAY first wrote about the Hertz police reports and lawsuits in 2020.

If you haven’t seen it before, this thread about what a law professor had to do to get Hertz to give her the car they were contractually obliged to give her is also astounding:

I had a Very Bad experience with @Hertz over Thanksgiving.

This is what happened & the letter I wrote. We are totally fine, & our Thanksgiving ended up wonderful, but I suspect this is a fraudulent business practice, & I want to give it visibility for those who don't or can't. pic.twitter.com/cr9haMSeXd— Kate Klonick (@Klonick) November 30, 2021

If not sure if there’s a good auto rental company out there but Hertz seems particularly bad.