Dozens of shoppers had shared tales on social media and broadcast tv packages of being arrested, “swatted” or stopped at border crossings after Hertz had incorrectly reported them to the authorities for stealing automobiles from its rental fleet.
In most of the circumstances, the shopper had paid for and correctly returned the automotive weeks or months prior — or had by no means rented a automotive in any respect.
Drew Seaser, an actual property appraiser in Colorado, realized of a warrant for his arrest in Georgia when he was stopped on the airport on the way in which to Mexico along with his household. Seaser told CBS News that he had by no means been to Georgia nor rented a automotive from Hertz. He was jailed for greater than 24 hours; the costs had been dismissed after his lawyer offered prosecutors with an alibi.
Paul-Anthony Knight said on “Inside Edition” that he was arrested after Hertz incorrectly filed a theft report in opposition to him. “All guns drawn on me. I was thrown to the ground. I was arrested. And I was locked up for over a week,” he mentioned. Another man, Julius Burnside, informed this system that he was jailed for greater than six months over an misguided report.
It was not instantly clear whether or not Seaser, Knight and Burnside had been among the many claimants who settled with Hertz, which emerged from chapter in 2021. An legal professional for dozens of shoppers who sued Hertz in Delaware didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Hertz mentioned in February that “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.”
But Hertz chief government Stephen M. Scherr was extra apologetic, saying in April on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that “it’s not acceptable to Hertz to have any customer, a single customer sort of caught up in some of what’s happened.” He mentioned the difficulty of false theft reviews was “among the first things” he handled since taking the helm of the corporate in February. “Several hundred people” had been impacted by the reviews, he mentioned.
Erroneous reviews had been withdrawn after they had been found, Scherr mentioned, “yet these people got caught, you know, in a moment” when the rescinding of the reviews “wasn’t recognized” by regulation enforcement. The false reviews had been “unfortunate,” he mentioned.
Marisa Iati contributed to this report.