This week, Hertz new CEO, Stephen Scherr, said his company was fixing a problem that caused innocent Hertz customers to be arrested for stealing rental cars they did not, in fact, steal.
“We have changed our policies to avoid the possibility of this happening and to put context to it for the several hundred people impacted, we engage in 15 million transactions per year, it’s 1/100th of a percent but again we make no excuse, not one customer should be negatively affected by this,” said Scherr on CNBC.
KPRC 2 Investigates previously reported on how Houstonians were accused of driving stolen rental cars. The criminal cases against those identified through court records have since been dropped.
The interview follows a recent call from some U.S. Senators for Hertz to correct the problem,
“He wants to paint this as a glitch. It’s not. It’s by design. It’s the way the standard operating procedures are written. And it’s the way they’re implemented. And so when you hear the CEO say that, Oh, this is all taken care of, it’s simply a glitch and they rescind police reports. They’ve never rescinded police reports. They don’t rescind police reports,” said Francis Malofiy, an attorney suing Hertz.
Related: Harris County Attorney exploring options on Hertz rental car arrests
Malofiy said this week that he now has 250 people as clients, who have had varying degrees of legal trouble because Hertz inaccurately reported vehicles stolen to local police agencies.