A car rental company banned my wife – but compared to some Hertz customers, she may have done well | Arwa Mahdawi

AAbout a year ago, my wife was filling out paperwork to rent a car when the woman behind the counter suddenly looked up in alarm. “I’m sorry,” she said in a stage whisper. “The computer says, ‘Do not rent to this woman under any circumstances.’ Looks like you’re banned for life? There was an awkward pause before she leaned forward conspiratorially and said: do?!”

Good question. The short answer is nothing; my wife is innocent. Here’s what happened: She and I rented a car to visit her family for Thanksgiving and dropped her off in Boston at 9 a.m. The company — which I won’t name because I don’t want them to impose their lawyers on me — said we returned it at 9 p.m. and insisted we pay them another $350. We said, “Damn, no,” so that referred us to debt collectors who stalked us for weeks. It could have had a terrible ripple effect on our credit score and our ability to get a mortgage, but a lawyer friend helped us solve the problem – except we didn’t realize the company had banned to my wife to use it or her many more affiliates. (Which we would never do by choice – however, car rental fees have increased by 43% and it was the cheapest option.)

Being banned for life from a major car rental company is inconvenient, but our situation, which I strongly suspect was caused by a computer glitch, could have been much worse. Hertz is being sued by hundreds of American customers who claim they were wrongfully arrested after the rental company reported them to the police for stealing cars they say they legitimately rented. A NASA employee, who is part of the lawsuit, was reportedly arrested at gunpoint after Hertz reported that the vehicle he rented had been stolen. A woman has spent 40 days in jail – away from her children and two-month-old baby – because she was arrested for stealing a car. Another client spent seven months in jail and eventually signed a plea deal just to end the ordeal.

The allegations against Hertz have been made public since 2019, but the case is back in the news as a judge recently ordered Hertz to unseal documents that show the company filed more than 3,300 stolen vehicle police reports involving its customers each year. (Hertz had tried to argue that these numbers were “trade secrets” and should be kept confidential). As USA Today noted in a new feature article on the subject: “This means that in the past seven years, since false reports of theft were reported, charges of theft have been brought against more than 23,000 people. It is not known how many of them were customers paying innocent.

What exactly is happening? Nothing, according to Hertz. The company called the accusations baseless; this argue reports of theft are “rare and only arrive after exhaustive attempts to reach the customer”. Class action attorneys, meanwhile, argue that Hertz has a faulty computer system and can’t track inventory; instead of investigating the “missing” cars himself, they say he outsources the work to police stations. The police, by the way, are not always happy about this – according to USA todaycourt records show that “after multiple reports of stolen vehicles ending up on Hertz property, [some police] the agencies reportedly said they would not take further reports from the company”.

Obviously, I don’t know all the facts of the ongoing Hertz trial. But the case has striking parallels to the British Postal scandal, where hundreds of postal workers were accused of theft due to a faulty computer system designed by Fujitsu; dozens of lives were ruined because management trusted technology over low-paid workers. It’s not just technology that’s to blame, of course – it’s an economic and legal system that protects and prioritizes businesses over people. And it’s not a bug in the system, it’s a feature.