A “longtime” Hertz customer says he is “done” with the car rental company after he claimed that the AI-powered damage detection system improperly flagged a nonexistent mark on the vehicle — even though video that he filmed immediately afterward appeared to back up his claim.
When angry customers sought to dispute the claim, they were unable to immediately reach a customer service rep.
“The link they send you does NOT allow you to submit a dispute. Calling customer support? Useless. They said they can’t do anything, even when I told them I have clear video evidence of the car being undamaged at the exact time the damage was claimed,” one customer said.
Hah, this is very similar to AI based smoking detection scam in hotels which is advertised as guaranteed revenue increase via smoking fees.
A “longtime” Hertz customer
Wait, those exist? Has Hertz not been the laughing stock of rentals for years now?
Is there a good rental company?
Kind of thought they were all shite
Oh most are but Hertz is famous for getting people arrested by reporting their rental cars stolen, fucking up charges and then threatening the ripped of customer and not having cars even when people reserved one.
Instead of going after Steam for NSFW content, payment processors need to crack down on AI customer service traps. If your company doesn’t have a meaningful way of getting a hold of an actual human and disputing a charge, your company should be shut off from the payment processor networks. After all, the process of a chargeback normally asks if you’ve first exhausted their customer service options to resolve the dispute. Companies that don’t have any meaningful customer service simply shouldn’t be eligible for Visa/Mastercard payments. The chargeback risk is just too high.
This festering AI dogshit covered in bottleflies will be the end of us.
I’ve asked AI to extrapolate humanity’s future from present trends
did you really need to ask ai
The only way to be sure.
At least we get a big tasty burrito in the end
Joke’s on you, that’s just two rats in a small tent
At least the rats will be housed
At some point these companies gotta feel the pain. If they deliver a bad product, just don’t pay them. They need us to give them money
They’ll go bankrupt again after enough people refuse to stop using their services.
Refuse to stop?
The real “win” for Hertz here is that they can outsource their “accountability” to the machine. Associates love to say “I wish I could help you, but the system does X”, “We can’t override the system”
It’s all bullshit… Hertz put the system in themselves and could include as many overrides or as much control as they please. This is a transparent, customer-hostile money grab. They KNOW that many people won’t contest these charges. They KNOW it’s an extra revenue source.
If you want to see something similar to this scumbaggery, there’s a new “vape/smoke” detector marketed towards hotels. It says RIGHT IN THEIR sales material “Unlock a new revenue stream!”
Companies aren’t doing this to make things more fair or efficient. They are doing it to siphon money out of the customer’s pocket, and they are praying you either don’t notice or just accept it.
Really disgusting and makes me wish we had some of the same consumer protections as the EU.
One of the problems is having our current “swindler in chief” at the White House is it’s emboldening companies to do this type of shenanigan. After all, if the president runs various scummy businesses, why can’t anyone else? The fish is rotting from the head down.
This is the new business paradigm. They no longer care about offering a quality customer experience. Now it’s all about extracting as much profit, while serving up as little as possible in exchange. The satisfaction of the customer is irrelevant.
if this happens to me and I cannot reach an agent immediately to reverse it, they get a chargeback and I never rent from them again. simple.
The only thing that scares a horrible corporation is another horrible corporation.
Also 3D printers and early morning walks on lonely city streets.
I had fradulent Doordash orders on my card once. They were deliveries in NYC, and I’ve never been farther east than Ohio. I disputed them, Doordash said “here’s pics of the food being delivered” and the card said “hey, can’t argue that.” I showed them that I wasn’t the one who placed the order and that I was literally a thousand miles away. Didn’t matter. Picture of a paper sack on a doorstep trumped facts.
Card Companies suck. I hate them all with a passion and treat them as the necessary evil they are.
This happened because your visa claim should have been ‘stolen card details/fraud’ but it was put through as ‘food not delivered’ instead. Either your card issuer didn’t understand what was needed, or else it was poorly described to them. And you can’t claim twice on the same transaction.
Then that is when you charge back. It’s an easy process.
He said the card company sided with DD. I guess at that point you can try and go to Visa/MC/Whomever directly but I honestly don’t know if they will even work with you or just insist it’s someone further down streams problem
At that point you call your member of Congress.
Im fairly certain I can scientifically prove calling your congressperson is less effective than stepping into your closet, closing the door and yelling “I’m upset!”
The couple times I’ve attempted a chargeback, my credit card company has sided with the business. The last time, we’d bought Switch controllers on sale from Walmart’s website, but they were sold by a third party and the stick click button didn’t work on them. We didn’t notice for a couple months because we’d only used them for games that didn’t use the stick click. We sent them to Nintendo for repair and they were returned unrepaired because they were counterfeit. We tried contacting Walmart 3 separate times after the seller failed to engage, after which point the return window was closed and the Walmart rep told me to dispute because their hands were tied.
So I did, and sent the product listing, my communication history with Walmart customer service, and the letter we received from Nintendo proving they were counterfeit. The credit card company reinstated the charge. I called them to ask why, and was told they asked Walmart to prove that the order had been fulfilled, and when they sent their evidence the chargeback was automatically canceled. I asked them to reopen it, and they did, and the supervisor told me that because the order was fulfilled and too much time had passed (probably around 6 months by then) there was nothing they could do.
Do not trust your credit card company to rectify malfeasance. The math is not on your side when they weigh the cost of pissing you off as an individual consumer versus the cost of pissing off a large business. They do not have your back.
Charge backs were fun while they lasted. Can’t let people have a single crumb of redress against being defrauded.
This is one reason I still keep my Amex. Amex always sides with it’s customers in charge backs, until definitive proof otherwise from the vendor comes.
It seems that every corporation in the US has openly turned into a con that’s openly fleecing its “customers”. There are no straight transactions to be found any more.
And inevitably, this will percolate into all the other regions so that the rest of the planet’s shareholders can enjoy this new bounty.
At least we have agencies that will watch for these kinds of scams and bad-faith practices and bring accountability to shady businesses, such as the Federal Consumer Prote- oh, wait, I’m being told that was entirely dismantled for some reason.
You mean, the Federal Anti-Business Agency? Yeah, can’t have this sort of thing.
You’ve just described capitalism
Late stage capitalism. We can’t hate on it when the market is regulated and competitive. When everything is captured by capital it breaks. It’s like…the heat death of the universe but in economic terms.
We can’t hate on it when the market is regulated and competitive.
Of course we can.
Except of, and that’s really weird, Amazon. Known for being shady in pretty much every other respect, they are weirdly still quite customer oriented.
Retail has one of the lowest barriers to entry of any industry, as well as the lowest barrier to churn. Amazon may appear to have a near-monopoly, but it’s a fragile one.
That’s certainly true. If Amazon starts going after customers, things can change very quickly.
Their customers are the sellers, and the sellers are getting fleeced just fine.
The buyers are a product they provide to the sellers.
Not quite, they sell a lot of stuff themselves as well.
It’s mindblowing the sheer VOLUME of Amazon Basics items there are, as someone who worked in their supply chain.
They have an easy tap on what sells, by virtue of running the marketplace.
Find a popular product, make an Amazon Basics version of it, undercut their best vendors, bam! Easy money. And leave the vendors swinging in the breeze with backstock they can’t move any more.
And they own the warehouses. Why not stock them with their own product in preference of vendors?
Sure. But they are often copies of best selling products from third party sellers, again throwing them under the bus.
I didn’t say they were nice lol
Imagine hooking this clanker up and have it start billing your customers automatically.
It’s not a bad idea but maybe run it offline for a while and then compare its findings against your current system’s… And then decide to roll it out?
I’d love to know how many false defects it has identified over a period, versus their previous systems. The article really only has a few incidents with half a million cars in their fleet globally… But then was this system only rolled out in that Houston store?
I have so many questions that I’m sure have unhinged answers, but I will be gleefully buggered before the daily mail will do any investigation outside of some social media posts, good day.
Hell yeah for using “clanker” as an AI slur lmao
I hope to be lined up against the wall first when they take over. Get it over with early 👍
Always interesting to see Hertz being ragged on (and for good reasons). Personally, used it a couple of times in Finland and had super smooth service, fresh cars and better prices than fully digital carshare when offers are on, maybe I am just lucky or local franchise does things better than overseas counterpart.
This isn’t an AI problem. It’s an accountability sink.
I wouldn’t bother chasing Hertz. I would send an email and issue a charge back. Then they will cal me.
Unfortunately, they will just send you to collections.
And I will just change my number.
They can’t on a charge back
I had a rental car after I lost mine in an accident, it was a rental through hertz. They tried to charge me a late fee onto my credit card, my insurance agent called them out on it and I didn’t have to pay.
These companies are all scams. Expedia advertised cancellations and not needing a credit card. When we tried to get the car we rented from the rental company they said we needed a credit card. Expedia refused to let us cancel or give a refund or even give us that amount in store credit.
Don’t use Expedia. Horrible service. Even if you wanna blame this on me for whatever reason, the fact that they refused to give us store credit for the money we already gave them (not even a refund) shows they won’t care about your problems either.
All the car rental companies suck but Hertz is undoubtedly the worst. They have refused to extend my rental twice, when I refused to exchange cars they were like “it’s okay, we know where you are, we can just come and get it”. They frequently have errors checking the car in after return, creating a customer service nightmare to get a receipt. The last time I returned a car I demanded a paper receipt in order to avoid this, they told me to go to the service desk. After waiting in line with all the people waiting to receive their rentals, the customer service rep told me that they “couldn’t find the car” that I literally just returned. After 30 minutes of waiting they still hadn’t figured it out so I just left. Got the receipt the next day, but I have never used Hertz again. Fuck them right to hell.
