Renting from Hertz? How to protect yourself from costly and criminal mistakes
Considering they’re forcing customers to pay fines before they can even pick up their vehicles, charging customers who rent Teslas for not filling up with gas, and sending innocent customers to jail, it’s amazing they’re still in business. If you get a $500 bill because of their toll tracking scam, you’re in luck.
Hertz Tesla Model 3
Yet people still rent cars from them. So here are finally some tips on how to do that without becoming the next victim in jail, or at least a way to spot an early warning sign that this could happen to you.
Hertz has earned a reputation for sending customers to jail for stealing cars they were supposed to return.
One Elite member was arrested four times and spent 30 days in jail, where she suffered a miscarriage, and a father and daughter were arrested at gunpoint for renting a car from Hertz.
Typically, the following happened:
- A customer has changed the vehicle or extended his rental
- The changes were not properly reflected in Hertz’s systems
- So it looked like the customer had not returned the vehicle at the scheduled time.
- Hertz reported it to the police
- And remained true to their history even though they continued to rent the vehicle to other customers. And sometimes those other customers were arrested for driving a vehicle that had been reported stolen.
Pickup line at Hertz Presidents Circle in Dallas – Fort Worth
In addition, not Change or expand a rental that seems to be a common denominator in some (but not all) cases where people have been wrongfully arrested for stealing the cars they rented, another tip for renting from Hertz is After returning the vehicle, pay attention to charges on your credit card.
A customer says he returned a rental car last week and Hertz charged his card every day after that. It turns out Hertz had not marked the car as returned.
I rented a car from a Hertz location on Friday and returned it the same day at a different location. I had a six-hour rental window and returned it in three hours. I parked it in the return line at the airport (the exact address was given to me) and spoke to the Hertz agent who told me I was good to go.
When I picked up the rental car, I was told my card would be charged $306, $106 for the rental and $200 for the security deposit, which would be refunded when I returned the car. None of this has been resolved. Instead, every day since then, another pending charge of $100 has been posted to my car.
This morning I also received a call from (…) informing me that I was behind on my rent.
If that happens to you—if you still see outstanding credit card charges from Hertz after you return your rental car—it can be frustrating to talk to the company about the incident. But at least you know up front that you’ll have to deal with the red tape to correct the mistake…and that you should do so before it’s too late.
(HT: @Neilennsphoto)
