One customer told Inside Edition he eventually cleared up the mess with a receipt proving he'd paid Hertz. The charges were dismissed, but not before he sat in jail for half a year. “Hertz destroyed more than just my life. It affected my family, my kids."
At Hertz, the slogan is, “Rent a car. Own the memory.” But several people outside Atlanta say their memories renting with Hertz are ones they’d much rather forget.
Inside Edition spoke to three customers who say they were arrested and charged with theft after Hertz incorrectly reported their rental cars had been stolen.
“All guns drawn. I was thrown to the ground. I was arrested. And I was locked up for over a week. Absolutely they knew I had their car,” Paul-Anthony Knight told Inside Edition.
“I absolutely paid for their car,” Knight added. The charges against Knight were later dismissed.
Julius Burnside says Hertz filed a stolen car report on him, too.
“I just see guns drawn,” Burnside said.
Burnside says he eventually cleared up the mess by showing a receipt proving he'd paid Hertz. The charges were dismissed, but not before he sat in jail for half a year.
“Hertz destroyed more than just my life. It affected my family, my kids,” Burnside said.
Bianca DeLoach says she was driving with her two kids when police arrested her.
“We paid for the car. Hertz reported the car stolen, even though we paid for the car,” DeLoach said.
Her charges were also dropped.
“It’s a massive, corporate disaster,” says attorney Francis Alexander Malofiy, who represents the Georgia residents and others suing Hertz. “This is a systemic, nationwide problem where Hertz is putting good-paying customers in jail wrongly.”
Malofiy says the confusion seems to happen in situations where customers extend their rentals or swap out for new vehicles, and that information doesn’t get processed by Hertz accurately, so the vehicles come up as missing in the Hertz computer network.
He says Hertz then reports the vehicle to the police as stolen, even though the customer still has it.
It's happening elsewhere. In California, cops arrested a real estate agent after Hertz reported her rental truck stolen.
Carrie Gibbs says she had rented a vehicle as a replacement after her car had been involved in a crash.
She says she was “completely shocked" over the charges, which were later dismissed.
“This has got to stop. It’s destroying other people’s lives,” Gibbs said.
Hertz didn't comment on the allegations in our interviews, but in a statement 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.”
They also say they care deeply about their customers, and successfully provide rental vehicles for tens of millions of travelers each year.
Related Stories
