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.
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.
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.
Charge backs were fun while they lasted. Can’t let people have a single crumb of redress against being defrauded.