Let Hertz put you in the defendant's seat?

Well before O.J. Simpson did some pretty fancy broken-field running through airport terminals to pick up the keys to his Hertz ("the superstar in rent-a-car"), Hertz ads famously promised to put folks who wanted and needed a car in the driver's seat. 

Somewhere along the way, they started putting drivers in the defendant's seat by erroneously claiming that a car had been stolen. When it hadn't been.

The false arrests were triggered in a number of different ways.

Some folks returned their cars after hours, and slipped the keys into an unmanned slot, only to find that the car had never been checked in. Instead, it was reported stolen.

Other folks extended their rental agreements, but their credit card info didn't keep up with the extended transaction.

Still others unwittingly rented a car that had been reported stolen by Hertz, which never bothered to rescind the stolen vehicle report once they found that the car was found.

Of course, some folks legitimately stole a Hertz rental. (Should that be illegitimately?) Presumably, the bad thieves aren't joining the good non-thieves in their lawsuit, where the plaintiffs are looking for more than half-a-billion dollars. 

Hertz customers have said they were arrested and jailed because the company accused them of stealing cars that they had paid to rent and, in some cases, had returned long before their arrest.

More than 230 plaintiffs are suing the company for false arrest and, in some cases, prosecution. The lawyers for this group say they know more cases are out there, with warrants for the arrest of people who rented from Hertz years ago continuing to surface today. (Source: USA Today)

Hertz, needless to say, is not rolling over and playing  dead. They're claiming that most of the vehicles in question for overdue, and that the renters had stopped communicating with the company. They say that the company "cares deeply about [their] customers." (Yawn and/or eye-roll.) And they state that the number of customers swept up in the grand theft auto dragnet is an infinitesimally small percentage of their overall customer base. (True dat.)

This is, of course, little comfort to those innocents who've been slapped in cuffs and hauled off to the hoosegow.

Meanwhile, Hertz's new CEO has quasi admitted that at least some of the customers involved in the suit have been done wrong. Stephen Scherr, in some recent media appearances said:

"It’s not acceptable to Hertz to have any customer — a single customer — sort of caught up in some of what’s happened"... 

Scherr told multiple news outlets, including CNBC's Squawk Box, that the company "will do right where our customers have been negatively affected," and that "we have changed our policies to avoid the possibility of this happening."

Scherr may have been a bit too candid for the comfort of Hertz communications and PR execs. They've turned down a USA Today request for interview time to ask about the comments Scherr recently made. 

In addition to its lawsuit troubles, Hertz may have the Feds breathing down their corporate neck. Some members of Congress have asked the FTC and/or the White House to take a look at what's going on with Hertz.

I only rent a car a couple of times a year. Sometimes with Hertz, sometimes with the we-try-harder folks at Avis. I've never been falsely arrested by either, but it does seem kind of strange that it's Hertz customers who are getting arrested, not Avis drivers. Which suggests that either Avis doesn't care when cars and drivers pull disappearing acts - which is unlikely - or that they have better policies and  procedures in place. 

Given the old time O.J. ads, it seems as if Hertz doesn't mind getting involved with the sketchy side of life. Of course, Hertz' latest poster boy - Tom Brady - may be a weird-ball, but he's not particularly sketchy. What's TB12 doing for Hertz? Why, he's lending his name and dimpled chin to plump for Hertz' fleet of electric Teslas.

But now that I think of it, Brady's not all that squeaky clean. There was that deflategate scandal. And doesn't the execrable Elon Musk have a little something to do with Tesla? 

Hmmmm. Maybe all this exposure to sketchy sorts, dating back to those galloping OJ ads, has turned Hertz into the suspicious types who think that all their customers are trying to rip them off.

Maybe Hertz just needs to try harder.