Something like this happened to me - I'd rented one of their cars with no return date because I hadn't fully planned out a multi-week trip in the eastern USA. The staff member said this was fine; they'd put in a return date of a week or two and then keep pushing it back.

Five weeks later I returned the car and flew back home to Australia. Found letters that had been posted saying that the car hadn't been returned and was considered stolen.

For some of these cases, it was arguably worse. It turns out that when Hertz gets back a vehicle they'd reported as stolen, they might "forget" to tell the cops that.

They'd rented a car for a fixed period, and were arrested and jailed for driving a stolen vehicle. They've shown police the lease agreement from Hertz showing they were authorised to drive the vehicle but police either couldn't or wouldn't verify the information with Hertz.

If being arrested and jailed for this wasn't bad enough, in some cases Hertz managers were slow to respond to police requests for information - so people have sat in jail for extended periods.

I rented a car from Hertz at SFO. After my trip I tried to file my expense report and found I didn’t have a charge on my credit card and it wasn’t listed in my Hertz account. Looking at the paperwork, I saw they rented it to someone else.

Thankfully I had no interactions with the police while driving that car.

False accusations and convictions ruin people's lives. I'm not sure why these companies are not mandated to pay people's current income and expected income growth over the course of their working lives because it'll probably be hard for these people to ever find a job again.

For instance, if I make $500k today, the company should be obligated to pay me this amount every year plus additional compounding interest on that amount in order to account for inflation and expected salary growth over the remainder of my working life.

The company should be forced to put this money aside in a trust immediately so I do not have to worry about the company going bankrupt. Company resources and equity ought to be garnished, if necessary, in order to accomplish this.

It's frustrating and bizarre to me that people are allowed to ruin others' lives and then they do not have to bear the full consequences of their actions. Surely, if one is found to have ruined someone's life, the least our justice system can do is obligate them to repay in full?

Wouldn't that incentivize people to try to get companies to "ruin their lives"? If someone had a way to get a well paying income, then get a big company to do the bare minimum that counts as "ruining their lives", they live the rest of their lives comfortably without having to get a job.

I think that, in theory, compensating people for life-ruining is obviously the right thing to do. The issue is that it relies on people to be perfect and never try to abuse the system, and if we can assume that, then we can just get rid of law enforcement and become a communist utopia.

What is practical is making these companies far more liable than they currently are, though. It is unacceptable that they have no penalties for destroying someone's future.

What you’re suggesting is fraud. There are already penalties for it.

While it might create an incentive, it’s a very high risk activity.

It also creates the right incentives for the company that it should:

A) not create policies that can result in ‘ruining a consumer’s life’ or at least do so knowing that it is a high risk, high cost activity.

B) know that if they choose to create such policies, they need to be adequately monitored for fraud and false positives.

That seems like a positive outcome.

> The issue is that it relies on people to be perfect and never try to abuse the system

Unlike the current system which relies on companies to be perfect and never try to abuse the system.

Of course, companies abusing the system happens far, far more often and at far, far larger scales than people abusing the system.

Insurance industry already has a lot of experience dealing with fraud of the similar type, and yet insurance companies still like the insurance business.

This line of thinking just sounds like being afraid of the mythical welfare queen and other policies enacted to protect wealth for rare occurrences.

It sounds good to make all these measures to make sure the scummiest people can't do their scams but most of the time you end up punishing people who need the protection the most by locking them out of the protection for not being able to legally navigate all the box checking.

Punish scammers harshly when caught, make it some exponential number of any profit gained, and open them up to audits in the past to figure out that exponential number. Opening it up to criminal liability and elimination of certain settlements without admitting guilt seem like it might help too.

Lol, fat chance

They're saying what SHOULD happen, not what DOES happen.

Holy crap, that is seriously messed up.

e-sign