A “longtime” Hertz customer says he is “done” with the car rental company after he claimed that the AI-powered damage detection system improperly flagged a nonexistent mark on the vehicle — even though video that he filmed immediately afterward appeared to back up his claim.
When angry customers sought to dispute the claim, they were unable to immediately reach a customer service rep.
“The link they send you does NOT allow you to submit a dispute. Calling customer support? Useless. They said they can’t do anything, even when I told them I have clear video evidence of the car being undamaged at the exact time the damage was claimed,” one customer said.
Instead of going after Steam for NSFW content, payment processors need to crack down on AI customer service traps. If your company doesn’t have a meaningful way of getting a hold of an actual human and disputing a charge, your company should be shut off from the payment processor networks. After all, the process of a chargeback normally asks if you’ve first exhausted their customer service options to resolve the dispute. Companies that don’t have any meaningful customer service simply shouldn’t be eligible for Visa/Mastercard payments. The chargeback risk is just too high.
Hah, this is very similar to AI based smoking detection scam in hotels which is advertised as guaranteed revenue increase via smoking fees.
The real “win” for Hertz here is that they can outsource their “accountability” to the machine. Associates love to say “I wish I could help you, but the system does X”, “We can’t override the system”
It’s all bullshit… Hertz put the system in themselves and could include as many overrides or as much control as they please. This is a transparent, customer-hostile money grab. They KNOW that many people won’t contest these charges. They KNOW it’s an extra revenue source.
If you want to see something similar to this scumbaggery, there’s a new “vape/smoke” detector marketed towards hotels. It says RIGHT IN THEIR sales material “Unlock a new revenue stream!”
Companies aren’t doing this to make things more fair or efficient. They are doing it to siphon money out of the customer’s pocket, and they are praying you either don’t notice or just accept it.
Really disgusting and makes me wish we had some of the same consumer protections as the EU.
One of the problems is having our current “swindler in chief” at the White House is it’s emboldening companies to do this type of shenanigan. After all, if the president runs various scummy businesses, why can’t anyone else? The fish is rotting from the head down.
This is the new business paradigm. They no longer care about offering a quality customer experience. Now it’s all about extracting as much profit, while serving up as little as possible in exchange. The satisfaction of the customer is irrelevant.
A “longtime” Hertz customer
Wait, those exist? Has Hertz not been the laughing stock of rentals for years now?
Is there a good rental company?
Kind of thought they were all shite
Oh most are but Hertz is famous for getting people arrested by reporting their rental cars stolen, fucking up charges and then threatening the ripped of customer and not having cars even when people reserved one.
It seems that every corporation in the US has openly turned into a con that’s openly fleecing its “customers”. There are no straight transactions to be found any more.
And inevitably, this will percolate into all the other regions so that the rest of the planet’s shareholders can enjoy this new bounty.
At least we have agencies that will watch for these kinds of scams and bad-faith practices and bring accountability to shady businesses, such as the Federal Consumer Prote- oh, wait, I’m being told that was entirely dismantled for some reason.
You mean, the Federal Anti-Business Agency? Yeah, can’t have this sort of thing.
You’ve just described capitalism
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We can’t hate on it when the market is regulated and competitive.
Of course we can.
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Except of, and that’s really weird, Amazon. Known for being shady in pretty much every other respect, they are weirdly still quite customer oriented.
Their customers are the sellers, and the sellers are getting fleeced just fine.
The buyers are a product they provide to the sellers.
Not quite, they sell a lot of stuff themselves as well.
It’s mindblowing the sheer VOLUME of Amazon Basics items there are, as someone who worked in their supply chain.
They have an easy tap on what sells, by virtue of running the marketplace.
Find a popular product, make an Amazon Basics version of it, undercut their best vendors, bam! Easy money. And leave the vendors swinging in the breeze with backstock they can’t move any more.
And they own the warehouses. Why not stock them with their own product in preference of vendors?
Sure. But they are often copies of best selling products from third party sellers, again throwing them under the bus.
I didn’t say they were nice lol
Retail has one of the lowest barriers to entry of any industry, as well as the lowest barrier to churn. Amazon may appear to have a near-monopoly, but it’s a fragile one.
That’s certainly true. If Amazon starts going after customers, things can change very quickly.
if this happens to me and I cannot reach an agent immediately to reverse it, they get a chargeback and I never rent from them again. simple.
I had fradulent Doordash orders on my card once. They were deliveries in NYC, and I’ve never been farther east than Ohio. I disputed them, Doordash said “here’s pics of the food being delivered” and the card said “hey, can’t argue that.” I showed them that I wasn’t the one who placed the order and that I was literally a thousand miles away. Didn’t matter. Picture of a paper sack on a doorstep trumped facts.
Card Companies suck. I hate them all with a passion and treat them as the necessary evil they are.
This happened because your visa claim should have been ‘stolen card details/fraud’ but it was put through as ‘food not delivered’ instead. Either your card issuer didn’t understand what was needed, or else it was poorly described to them. And you can’t claim twice on the same transaction.
What company was it? I’m considering switching cards, and I want to make sure I avoid them like the plague.
Then that is when you charge back. It’s an easy process.
He said the card company sided with DD. I guess at that point you can try and go to Visa/MC/Whomever directly but I honestly don’t know if they will even work with you or just insist it’s someone further down streams problem
At that point you call your member of Congress.
Im fairly certain I can scientifically prove calling your congressperson is less effective than stepping into your closet, closing the door and yelling “I’m upset!”
For changing their vote on a bill backed by lobbyists, maybe. But they have entire constituent services offices dedicated to helping voters out of just this kind of situation. Consumer protection is a common area they intervene in.
Donate abut 1500$ to them and they will listen to you.
The couple times I’ve attempted a chargeback, my credit card company has sided with the business. The last time, we’d bought Switch controllers on sale from Walmart’s website, but they were sold by a third party and the stick click button didn’t work on them. We didn’t notice for a couple months because we’d only used them for games that didn’t use the stick click. We sent them to Nintendo for repair and they were returned unrepaired because they were counterfeit. We tried contacting Walmart 3 separate times after the seller failed to engage, after which point the return window was closed and the Walmart rep told me to dispute because their hands were tied.
So I did, and sent the product listing, my communication history with Walmart customer service, and the letter we received from Nintendo proving they were counterfeit. The credit card company reinstated the charge. I called them to ask why, and was told they asked Walmart to prove that the order had been fulfilled, and when they sent their evidence the chargeback was automatically canceled. I asked them to reopen it, and they did, and the supervisor told me that because the order was fulfilled and too much time had passed (probably around 6 months by then) there was nothing they could do.
Do not trust your credit card company to rectify malfeasance. The math is not on your side when they weigh the cost of pissing you off as an individual consumer versus the cost of pissing off a large business. They do not have your back.
Charge backs were fun while they lasted. Can’t let people have a single crumb of redress against being defrauded.
This is one reason I still keep my Amex. Amex always sides with it’s customers in charge backs, until definitive proof otherwise from the vendor comes.
The only thing that scares a horrible corporation is another horrible corporation.
Also 3D printers and early morning walks on lonely city streets.
This festering AI dogshit covered in bottleflies will be the end of us.
I’ve asked AI to extrapolate humanity’s future from present trends
did you really need to ask ai
The only way to be sure.
At least we get a big tasty burrito in the end
Joke’s on you, that’s just two rats in a small tent
At least the rats will be housed
Now you’re getting it, Citizen!
At some point these companies gotta feel the pain. If they deliver a bad product, just don’t pay them. They need us to give them money
If I earned a car rental company I would take out billboards with this story on them.
This isn’t an AI problem. It’s an accountability sink.
I wouldn’t bother chasing Hertz. I would send an email and issue a charge back. Then they will cal me.
Unfortunately, they will just send you to collections.
They can’t on a charge back
And I will just change my number.
Imagine hooking this clanker up and have it start billing your customers automatically.
It’s not a bad idea but maybe run it offline for a while and then compare its findings against your current system’s… And then decide to roll it out?
I’d love to know how many false defects it has identified over a period, versus their previous systems. The article really only has a few incidents with half a million cars in their fleet globally… But then was this system only rolled out in that Houston store?
I have so many questions that I’m sure have unhinged answers, but I will be gleefully buggered before the daily mail will do any investigation outside of some social media posts, good day.
Hell yeah for using “clanker” as an AI slur lmao
It could have been worse. This is a shout out to not use Hertz.
Hertz will pay $168 million to customers it falsely accused of stealing its cars
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusation-stealing-cars-settlement
They also own
- Dollar
- Thrifty
- Firefly
Whoa, I didn’t see the first time around that they double downed even after losing many cases. Sounds like it was intentional.
I used to be a weekly Hertz customer and I noped right on out after this started happening.
Chargeback. Credit card companies won’t accept that BS and a chargeback is for the entire amount.
You would probably only get a partial charge back. You still got it as a rental, so that isn’t eligible for a charge back.
Oh it certainly is if he was charged for damage that didn’t occur. I’ve been on the other end of chargeback disputes defending companies. A chargeback is absolutely warranted here and he can prove it. He’ll win.
I don’t understand the point of this. Minor scratches and dings are a cost of doing business. Driving away your customers over a nickel or dime will leave you in bankruptcy. It’s bizarre.
Also I’ve rented enough scratched, pitted and dented cars to know that no way are they spending that $650 on fixing them.
The point is to make money. Specifically to make a lot of money this year and get a bonus. Bankruptcy will be a problem for the next CEO.
But what if you turned the cost of doing business an opportunity for profit? All they know is squeeze.
Hertz went bankrupt during the pandemic and came out of it 4 years ago.
There just isn’t enough real competition in car rentals. There are lots of brands, like Alamo, Enterprise, National Car Rental, Hertz, Dollar, Thrifty, Firefly, Budget, Avis, etc. But, that’s just 3 companies. Avis Budget Group ($CAR), Hertz Global ($HTZ) and Enterprise (private).
Admittedly, I’ve had great experiences with Enterprise in the US. It blows my mind how expensive it is, but I’ve never had any issues like what OP posted.
Enterprise used to be the best by far, but ever 2020 or so, prices are way up, their cars are all old clunkers, and most of their employees are very young and don’t know what they’re doing.
They all end up costing roughly the same in the end. Enterprise is just more honest about it.
There are some other alternatives like Turo
Wouldn’t surprise me if they just gave up on the one off customers and are banking on business travelers. The people that charge it to a company card and nobody is really paying attention. Accounting department is just gonna see another Hertz charge which is probably pretty normal.
Most companies just pay whatever bills come in. For example, a random dude set up a fake company and was just sending invoices to Google and Facebook. He collected north of 100 million. Took them over 2 years to catch on.
I don’t know, this would probably create an actionable issue with my company.
Is that even illegal?
Submitting invoices for goods/services not rendered would constitute fraud. The companies paid them which was dumb but they weren’t entirely incompetent either. I simplified my original comment for brevity since I linked it but the relevant bits…
… impersonated the Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer, Quanta Computer — with which both tech companies do business — by setting up a company in Latvia with the same name. Using myriad forged invoices, contracts, letters, corporate stamps, and general confusion created by the corporate doppelganger, they successfully bamboozled Google and Facebook into paying tens of million of dollars in fraudulent bills …
Going back to Hertz. Companies already pay bills to them. As long as the fines are in the realm of normal rental costs I’d expect they’d go unnoticed for a decent while.
Ah, if they’re pretending to be a company they legitimately do business with, definitely illegal.
All the car rental companies suck but Hertz is undoubtedly the worst. They have refused to extend my rental twice, when I refused to exchange cars they were like “it’s okay, we know where you are, we can just come and get it”. They frequently have errors checking the car in after return, creating a customer service nightmare to get a receipt. The last time I returned a car I demanded a paper receipt in order to avoid this, they told me to go to the service desk. After waiting in line with all the people waiting to receive their rentals, the customer service rep told me that they “couldn’t find the car” that I literally just returned. After 30 minutes of waiting they still hadn’t figured it out so I just left. Got the receipt the next day, but I have never used Hertz again. Fuck them right to hell.
No matter how the inspection is performed, it should not be done without the customer present.
Also if the car is moved after the customer returned it, the damage could have happened while the car is moved. Or for other reasons after the customer returned the car.I don’t see how an AI scanning or even a human evaluation at a later point in time can be legally binding?
I bet this shitshow doesn’t happen in EU, because I don’t think it would be legal here without the customer present.
It might. I rented a car for one day in Belgium from. A week after I got back to the US I got a letter saying I had badly scraped the rims and was being charged $1500. I emailed them and challenged it, and they said, “oh that was a paperwork error on our part, don’t pay it.” Not sure what would have happened if they had tried to fight me.
Could even just be their policy to try that all the time (or some random % of the time) and just back down any time a customer pushes back. Which is fucked up, but they might have never actually fought you on it because it was just meant to get free money from those who wouldn’t push back and just pay it.
Every type of insurance company does that BS. Always fight it. When they push back, fight even harder.
And the less regulation, the more this shit happens and people don’t have the time or energy to fight it. Probably never happens on their corporate accounts, because then it’s retained corporate law firm vs retained corporate law firm.
But standard retail customers? Even if only 10% don’t fight back, huge profits, and the CEO can buy a bigger jet.
Reminds me of this
“Alternative revenue streams”
Weird. This sound awfully like fraud. Cause if I was tell companies to bogus charges, I would get charged.
What, we all should do is incorporate and use corporations to scam other corporations. It’s just a civil matter than.
definitely sounds like these rental companies are trying to scam people, if they scam enough people, and most dont try to fight it, they profit from it.
Maybe they can make the claim, but I doubt it is legally binding for the customer.
The difference being that just making the claim may be illegal in EU.
We have way stronger consumer protection than USA, and as you state, you received the claim in USA.
