That article had the same generalizations. I've rented a car once in the last decade, but prior to that I travelled some for work and it wasn't unusual for me to get a car rental. Thank goodness this never happened to me since after getting reimbursed by the company I threw away my receipts.

Been following this for a while. Some back story here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/02/11/hertz-customers-car-theft/

The fact that the bastards refused to acknowledge any fault on their part in the settlement means I will never give them my business again.

Be aware, this can happen with any car rental company, so my advise is to keep your receipts, and make sure you have documentation for the return of the vehicle. I never do the self-drop off. I want a receipt saying I returned it. If that means dropping it off the day before I fly out, and taking an Uber or a cab to the airport, that's fine with me. Less stress anyway,

The problem is that these checkouts are all automated now. Someone forgets to check a box in their software, and the system doesn't know that the car was returned, the it may send out a stolen car report to the PD automatically, and a warrant is put out on you, all without a human actually checking first. It can happen with any of these companies, it's just that Hertz has been very sloppy about this the past few years, and made little attempt to fix the problem.

You get pulled over for something and local PD sees a warrant is out for you, their hands are tied and have to bring you in until it's sorted out. People have spent a night or two in jail until they're cleared. In a few cases people have spent a month in jail.

$168 million on 364 claims. Read the NYT article, not a lot of information on how or why it happened. I don't know if $500k would be sufficient if I had ended up spending time in jail over this BS.

Hard to believe Blue left off "Intel Inside" for that one.