Five Hertz customers brought suit in Delaware Superior Court this week, alleging that the company's poor inventory management led to them being arrested at gunpoint--sometimes minutes after picking up their rental cars. One of the plaintiffs is a 13-year-old girl held at gunpoint while on vacation with her father.
The suit claims these arrests result from Hertz's longstanding issue with losing track of its own cars. It then reports them as stolen, rather than spend the money and resources to find them on its own, the suit claims. Then, when the cars turn up, the company fails to notify law enforcement. If the claim is true, and if it results from formal or informal company policy, Hertz may have created a world of trouble for its customers and itself as it sought to cut costs.
Hertz is already facing multiple legal actions from hundreds of customers who were arrested for driving their rental cars. But this new lawsuit poses a significant new problem for the company. For one thing, most of the previous arrests happened after customers extended their rental contracts and the resulting hold on their credit or debit cards failed to go through. Hertz's alleged policy of reporting a car as stolen when a hold fails is certainly questionable--but at least it bears some relationship to something the customer actually did.
In these five cases, customers say they were arrested and held at gunpoint because Hertz had reported their rental cars as stolen before they ever rented them....
News The Jewellers Association of Australia (JAA) has corrected the false claims it made about its financial affairs in a statement published on 31 March. These false claims were first documented b...