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Hertz to Pay $168M for Falsely Accusing Customers of Stealing Cars

Some of the hundreds of falsely accused customers were arrested and imprisoned.

Hertz plans to pay $168 million to settle lawsuits from hundreds of disgruntled customers who allege they were falsely accused of car theft, resulting in some cases of arrest, felony charges, and even imprisonment. The deal will lay to rest 364 claims, which the company said Monday constituted more than 95 percent of the complaints filed against Hertz Global Holdings since it filed for bankruptcy in 2020. In one complaint, a Mississippi man said he’d been jailed for six and a half months for missing a hearing after Hertz reported his vehicle—which he’d returned—as stolen; in another, a woman claimed she’d spent 37 days behind bars, missing her children’s nursery school graduation, after Hertz failed to properly record her rental extension. In April, CEO Stephen Scherr attributed the false theft reports to a glitch in the company’s systems, which wrongly recorded the vehicles as overdue when they had either been returned or were still legally being driven by unsuspecting customers, according to the Associated Press.