Half of the stories about billing for unused gas are clearly just theft. Why do consumers have no recourse against companies that steal from them? If I made charges to someone's card for services that weren't rendered, I'd probably go to jail.
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.
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.
As a general rule, people stealing or otherwise breaking the law via companies get cut way more slack than random individuals.
Like, Wells Fargo set up millions of fraudulent accounts for its customers, and zero people went to jail.
Even if you accept the premise that upper level management somehow didn't know, a certain level of negligence should absolutely lead to prison time when the impact is this is large.
Another classic example is from the 2007–2008 financial crisis, for which there were only two people who were actually charged for their wrong doing:
Kareem Serageldin got a 30 month sentence, and Lee Farkas got 30 years but only served 9 and was released because of his "susceptibility to COVID-19 while incarcerated at the Coleman low-security prison in Wildwood" [0][1].
No prison time but one was prosecuted and sentenced to home confinement and community service...
>A former top Wells Fargo executive avoided prison time for her role in the bank’s sham accounts scandal, after a federal judge on Friday instead sentenced her to six months of home confinement and three years of probation. She was also ordered to pay a $100,000 fine and perform 120 hours of community service.
Was this the person in HR, who, when the good hearted Wells Fargo’s employees reported the ethical violation, had them terminated?
I don’t understand why everyone in their HR department wasn’t immediately terminated and thrown into prison, and forced to pay the salaries of anyone who was fired.
I wonder about this constantly. Why is there such a legal power imbalance between people and companies, especially large companies? If a company wants to charge me extra they just do it, they don't have to provide proof of anything. If I want to resolve the issue I have to call them or my credit card company, neither is simple and has something like a 75% chance of being successful (IME) even if I'm completely right.
On two separate occasions a company has charged me for something and after I've made multiple calls and escalations (which of course can only happen during certain hours) they finally refunded me by saying "we'll make a one-time exception as a favor to you" even though they were literally stealing from me. In one case they only finally did it after I contacted the attorney general.
Honestly I don't even really care if it was a mistake (which are usually systemic issues) vs intentional, it is theft. In one example Comcast charged me a late fee even though I had autopay set up and they just missed running the charge. I wonder how many people just didn't notice.
I've long thought the only solution to these issues is to levy fines (or jail time if intentional theft) large enough to discourage the behavior. If it is still happening, keep raising the fines until it stops.
It goes beyond just stealing some money. They can ruin your credit rating by claiming you didn't pay your bills even when they are incorrect. I was wondering this same thing recently after being charged for something for an extra month after cancelling. Chasing them to get the money back was a lot of hassle but if the situation were reversed they can screw my life for years.
The question shouldn't be "why" because the answer is obvious: Companies have more money and more people and more time and therefore more power than you as an individual. The solution also already exists: The government should be giving individuals free lawyers to go after companies who violate their rights. We have this system in my country where there is a people's lawyer that can choose to take up cases that seem deserving. Then we also have certain government sponsored union-like associations whose job it is to sue companies who commit wage theft and they are good at it.
After all when some random person steals from you, you generally also don't have to sue them and hope a court decides in your favor. That is all the job of the government (=police). Private individuals should not have to waste their time in the legal system to defend laws that the government created.
For a lot of simple and obvious things the formula should be to call and report a "disagreement". The government employee who took the call [immediately] calls to hear the company side of the story and orders it to correct it's behavior or may chose to issue a fine. The issue is resolved in 5-20 minutes. A different fine tailored for the size of the company for not responding fast enough. If the company disagrees with the verdict they may take the government agency to court. This should mostly happen if the issue is arguably not simple and obvious enough. If the customer disagrees the court is also there to figure out the mess.
> Private individuals should not have to waste their time in the legal system to defend laws that the government created.
Government should not make a mockery of it self by creating laws that it doesn't intend to enforce or is incapable of.
> We have this system in my country where there is a people's lawyer that can choose to take up cases that seem deserving
We also have this in the US, actually we have many (state attorney generals, federal FTC and CFPB, and so on). Unfortunately (similar to our cops with crime), they're only going to bother to do anything if a company is blatantly screwing over somewhere between hundreds and thousands of people, or if the person complaining is a wealthy political donor or otherwise a friend of an elected official.
I think this boils down to the existence of megacorps. IMHO a state should just not allow corporations to grow beyond a certain marketcap level.
I see no real world benefit to allow such companies to exist, it creates "too big to fail" schemes, inefficient structures, and overall companies that are able to compete with literally small states or countries in terms of capital /legal / lobby power.
Beyond a certain marketcap, a company should not be allowed to grow anymore and just forced to split in multiple entities.
I'm surprising myself a bit, but I think I agree. I think these types of problems are inherent in companies of a certain size. When you reach a point where there is so much structure that you can only progress via metrics those metrics will inherently start to only serve themselves instead of the original goal they were attempting to be a proxy for.
When you think about it, the "winner takes all" martingale is already forbidden in most states of law.
Two companies are not allowed to merge if their total market share would past 30%, because that would allow a monopoly and thus total control over the price of goods. A winner cannot just buyout his previous opponents indefinitely.
Similarly, a company cannot (at least where I live) sell at a loss. That would allow a company with more capital to lower prices at an impossible level until competition dies out, and then increase prices back when concurrents are wiped out.
These regulations are different of course, but the overall idea is similar: a company should not be able to press its advantage exponentially. And I think the marketcap is but a forgotten rule in these regulations.
Once a company reaches a monstrous level of market cap, it is too diversified to fail, and can press its legal / lobbying leverage on some of its subbusinesses at an unfair level against competitors. If you're a search engine company, competition against Google is not just competing against an other player in the search space. You're competing against the legal and lobbying power of 10 companies.
And that's not even mentioning state supremacy concerns. I vote for my government. They may not be always want I want them to, but hey, that democracy. I don't vote for mega corps governance. I don't want them to have bargaining power over my state or country.
> I've long thought the only solution to these issues is to levy fines (or jail time if intentional theft) large enough to discourage the behavior. If it is still happening, keep raising the fines until it stops.
We need a corporate death penalty and three strike laws - where three is scaled to the customer base or total monetary damages or whatever. Upon death, any and all assets (including shares of the company, in case of restructuring) go to employee salaries until the company can be wound down.
Or just remove the limited liability. In sense of not going after assets, but at least that any fines or prison sentences apply to anyone who had at least single stock at the time. Company you own commits fraud, you go to prison. Simple and effective to force stock owners to police board and thus employees in the end.
It's not companies that do this kind of stuff, it's people working at companies. You just jail/fine those people and all the chain of command up to the CEO. That would be an incentive to establish good procedures and not to steal on customers.
It actually is companies that do this stuff, in that if the company had sufficient monitoring and oversight in place the people working at the company wouldn't be able to do it.
That would of course require them to strive to provide the best product or service they can rather than towards maximizing their profit, though.
With all of the pitch fork and torches being gathered, who is at fault to point the gather crowd to go after? Is it Hertz for accepting faulty software, or the software devs for designing such broken code and passing it off as production ready? Where was this program made? How many boats will be required to ferry the gathering crowd to the offshored lands?
Also, at what point do police stop accepting "stolen" car reports from Hertz? This is such a failure on so many levels, why is Hertz the only ones receiving the hate?
> who is at fault to point the gather crowd to go after?
Ultimately I'll point the fault at the district attorney, as they are the ones who decide what is prosecuted and what is not.
They take unsubstantiated allegations from hertz and put people to jail, but at the same time don't lift a finger to prosecute the clearly guilty corporations for fraud. So yes, while mistakes are made all around, the ultimate guilty party is the district attorney.
Have there been any convictions in any of these false cases due to poorly written software? I get being arrested and detained in jail for any length of time is total bullshit. Unless these people cannot post bail after being arraigned, that should be the end of it. Once a defense attorney challenges the case, the DA should be dropping charges. If the DA continues to prosecute, what jury is convicting? So this "going to jail" sounds like it's getting conflated from held until arraignment versus serving time after being found guilty
"Ultimately I'll point the fault at the district attorney,"
For it to be the DA's fault, lots of other things have failed first. So I don't really see how the DA is that relevant. If devs failed by making software that doesn't work in a way that the company using it cannot keep track of their inventory in a way that makes it look like their customers have not returned items in a way that looks like it has been stolen so that they can make a report to the police who cannot properly investigate which results in someone being arrested but never charged does not make any sense for a DA to receive any blame in this situation at all. (jeebus that must be the longest sentence I've ever typed).
> So I don't really see how the DA is that relevant.
Because only they are the one with the power to actually act on this and pursue charges. They are supposed to validate the facts before proceeding, but here they just take the word of hertz without any evidence (since hertz's systems are messed up as you say so they don't have any idea what's where) and run with it, accusing innocent people.
The DA is the one with the power to tell hertz to produce credible evidence or go pound sand. But they don't.
so by all of this, you are implying that DAs are taking these cases to trial and winning. this is where I am not familiar. what jury has heard one of these cases and convicted? what DA has brought a case to trial. where is this happening. you seem to have some form of awareness that this is the case. share it so we can all see where this is happening.
> Why do consumers have no recourse against companies that steal from them?
Stuff like this is easy to charge back with your credit card company.
But in this case, the article makes it clear that the people were able to get the charges reversed by talking to Hertz. It wasn't necessarily convenient, but the funds were returned when a human saw the mistake.
> If I made charges to someone's card for services that weren't rendered, I'd probably go to jail.
If you entered into an agreement with someone to do business and then accidentally charged them the wrong amount, you would not go to jail. That's what happened here, as annoying as it is.
I know this is HN and we're supposed to get our pitchforks out any time a company makes a mistake, but your analogy doesn't hold. Legally, intentional theft is a higher bar than a mistake. You're right that you'd be in trouble if you just started charging random people's credit cards fraudulently, but you're not going to jail if you're doing business with someone and you occasionally make a mistake about the amount when it's time to bill them. (FYI: Billing mistakes happen all the time at scale)
If you could prove that someone in Hertz was diabolically masterminding a scheme to knowingly milk money from customers by charging EV drivers for gas, you could have a case. But if Hertz is just accidentally charging a couple people here and there for gas (as appears to be the case from the article) then that's not "stealing". It's just a mistake.
> Stuff like this is easy to charge back with your credit card company.
That's not actually true. This sort of "oh, you never have to pay for services not rendered" is mostly just a fiction. I've had multiple issues with major credit card issuers who refused to persist chargebacks when vendors screwed me.
The other issue is that, even if you successfully chargeback against a vendor, oftentimes that vendor is a monopoly or duopoloy, and they will terminate your account and ban any new accounts using the same name or card number, and you'll be screwed.
> The other issue is that, even if you successfully chargeback against a vendor, oftentimes that vendor is a monopoly or duopoloy, and they will terminate your account and ban any new accounts using the same name or card number, and you'll be screwed.
Did you tell that (by letter) to your district or state attorney?
Other than the "they have the right to refuse service" that sibling mentioned, umm... that's not what state or district attorneys do. In fact district attorneys prosecute crimes.
> Stuff like this is easy to charge back with your credit card company.
Hah. Your card company will accept the dispute, Hertz will provide them with the rental contract you signed and say "he agreed to pay it!", and your card company will close the dispute without ever even following up with you.
> But in this case, the article makes it clear that the people were able to get the charges reversed by talking to Hertz. It wasn't necessarily convenient, but the funds were returned when a human saw the mistake.
Actually the article makes it clear that they had to go round and round in circles with bot-like support reps who probably haven't ever seen a Tesla in whatever slum they can afford.
> If you entered into an agreement with someone to do business and then accidentally charged them the wrong amount, you would not go to jail.
It's not accidental when you keep doing it until the news gets involved. BTW, how can they even charge a fuel fee without a human being involved to... you know... fuel it? Shouldn't that human have noticed that there was no gas tank? Hmm... Almost like it wasn't accidental.
Class action is often prohibited through terms that force you to act solely and also they require arbitration. This sort of thing should be banned and made retroactive.
It can get extremely expensive before anything is done. And in fact the high price of it can keep it going, when it’s benefitting those with lobbying power
Just take a look at wage theft and federal police theft stats compared with all other forms of robbery in the US - it’s out of control but the only thing that seems to get actioned on is the small shoplifting issue, not the vastly worse forms of theft (per dollar value)
When they've made approximately nine digits off of it. After all, they need to be able to keep some of their ill-gotten profits, the lawyers need at least 7 digits (more often 8), the class representatives need perhaps 5-6 digits, and everyone else (who was fleeced out of 3 digits) gets 1 digit.
While I generally agree with your premise, the problem is that when companies realize they can make more money through "old big company incompetence", at best it means they have no incentive to improve, and at worst in means they can maliciously overcharge and then just blame it on "incompetence".
I really think government needs to enact laws that make companies compensate people for their time when they have to deal with bureaucratic nightmares like this. Right now companies just get to externalize the costs of their fucks ups onto everyone else.
I remember, back in the last century, a TV station did a test, where they went to a whole bunch of supermarkets, and brought stuff. Some was on sale, some was not.
What they found, was that every (100%) error in price went to the favor of the company. Not one single error was in favor of the customer.
Often, the stores were good about correcting the error, but the cashier could never do it. They always had to go to the service counter.
Massachusetts regulation addresses this particular misincentive with a "one item (per customer day) is $10 off" when a food store/department scanner/checkout price isn't the lowest of advertised/display/sticker/scanner price. My own supermarket experience is of a clear sign posted by the cashier, and of hassle varying from the cashier handling it routinely and quickly, to trick question "So you want ${scanned - correct} back?", to waiting for a manager type and initialing/signing something simple.
At least locally pricing errors are always decided in favor of the customer. Of course you have to notice it but you're always entitled to the lowest advertised price on any item.
I think you are misunderstanding the comment you replied to. They are saying that whenever a customer at a grocery store checkout was charged an incorrect price, the price was always higher than the advertised price, never lower.
Yes, customers that notice it can have it corrected to the accurate, lower price. But the problem is that whenever there were "whoopsies", it's hard to just believe it was just a bug or well-intentioned mistake when there were never mistakes that would have resulted in a lower price.
My favorite is the new "digital coupon" version where just having the loyalty card isn't enough - you also have to have the app, add the coupon to your account, and HOPEFULLY by the time you reach the register that coupon has "posted" and the register applies it for you lol.
Yep compensation for time must be required. Insurance companies, particularly in healthcare (Aetna especially), love subjecting customers to repeated calls with hour long wait times. They hope to just exhaust you from getting a claim honored.
Yes. This is why I find Hanlon's Razor annoying (" Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"), as it doesn't consider the higher order effect of what happens when the malicious are aware of the adage and willing to pretend to be incompetent.
One obvious example: OneTrust cookie banners. They're nearly all misconfigured to have the "Reject Cookies" button greyed out or missing (or a link to a little minigame) and the "Accept Cookies" button prominent. Are all companies simply so incompetent? Is OneTrust (easy; no, it's correct on their own website). Or are they deliberately and maliciously breaking the law and when challenged will just do the wide-eyed "oh gosh, I'm such a silly-billy clutz with these things tee-hee"
Agreed. Also worth noting that Hanlon’s razor was not originally intended to be interpreted as a philosophical idea in the same way as Occam’s:
> The term ‘Hanlon’s Razor’ and its accompanying phrase originally came from an individual named Robert. J. Hanlon from Scranton, Pennsylvania as a submission for a book of jokes and aphorisms, published in 1980 by Arthur Bloch.
No. Theft requires intent. If we accept that it's incompetence and no one actually intended to apply the fee to an electric vehicle then it is not theft.
If no one intended to apply the fee to an electric vehicle, then why was the fee applied to an electric vehicle? Moreover why did it happen numerous times? And why was support not immediately like "oh crap lemme fix that"?
It's not a question of ignorance, it's a question of intent.
If you walk into Walmart and intentionally walk out with a banana without paying, you can't get out of prosecution by claiming that you didn't know it was illegal to do that.
If, on the other hand, you accidentally neglect to scan the banana at the self checkout then it is a valid defense to say that you thought you'd already scanned it in and you must have gotten confused by all the other items you were handling.
The problem is that this opens up an obvious vulnerability - underfund the department that's supposed to ensure compliance so that you effectively end up breaking the law at scale and yet retain this plausible deniability.
The only way out is to reverse the situation - companies should have even less leniency. You can't expect a single person to know the specifics of every law or to pay attention 100% of the time, but you can absolutely expect a company to be able to hire the necessary manpower to ensure near-bulletproof compliance.
> It's not a question of ignorance, it's a question of intent.
> If you walk into Walmart and intentionally walk out with a banana without paying, you can't get out of prosecution by claiming that you didn't know it was illegal to do that.
> If, on the other hand, you accidentally neglect to scan the banana at the self checkout then it is a valid defense to say that you thought you'd already scanned it in and you must have gotten confused by all the other items you were handling.
Call me old fashioned, but I'm not going to take legal advice from TikTok personalities, especially when the claim sounds like one of those scarebait articles newspapers print on a bad news day.
Big company incompetence exists because, paradoxically, it's more profitable.
The solution is making it less profitable, or better yet treating the business like you'd treat a human. Put a derogatory report on their credit and make sure they can't get any kind of credit (often even including pre-paid rent) for 7 years....
