Damages are deceptive; a crack in a bumper would necessitate a replacement of the bumper cover. A $1,000 charge is not unreasonable for that.
I'm assuming CCRG would be Cendant Car Rental Group, the former parent company of Avis Budget. Cendant (which owned and operated several travel-related industries, including at one point IIRC Orbitz) spun off their car rental operations, which were renamed Avis Budget Group. Sounds like their claims department might be using old paperwork...?
Any claims department with any company is going to do just that. There are legal requirements the claims department has to meet in order to fall under insurance and collection regulations. What you were sent is legally termed a "demand letter," and without specific wording (which, unfortunately, sounds sometimes unnecessarily harsh), it doesn't legally meet the requirements of being a demand letter. Insurance companies usually won't pay unless a demand letter has been sent. Asking you about the damage nicely isn't how insurance companies and claims offices work. If indeed they are right and the customer is wrong (which is often the case), asking nicely just weakens their case if they do need to pursue the customer--and in any case, it delays the proceedings further, as they need to wait several more weeks for further correspondence.
As for the delay: four months
is a long time and is representative of an understaffed claims department. They should be making initial contact (barring some odd thing, like that they had an incorrect address for you) within about three weeks at the most. However, understanding that claims offices do get backed up or are forced to wait for things like backed-up body shops to even get estimates out, I wouldn't say that receiving a bill four months after the fact is "proof" that the company is running a scam. If indeed you weren't covered by LDW, the claims office should be able to produce documentation even a year or two after the fact that the damage was found at (or within a short while after) return. That factor--the interval of time between your return and when they
discovered the damage, rather than the interval of time between your return and when they contact you about it--is the one that determines the validity of the claim.
And at a major corporate-operated store at a major airport location like EWR, the question of whether the rental company is trying to scam you shouldn't even come up. They're not. There may be a paperwork mix-up, or there may be some ambiguity (like there was in your case, with the possibility that the damage occurred in Avis's parking lot) and the rental company may assume in the event of that ambiguity that you caused it, but they're not intentionally charging you for damage that they
know was not caused by you. (You can't unequivocally say the same thing about franchised locations of especially the value brands, but corporate-operated stores do not intentionally operate with shady business practices.)
Sounds like it all ended well in your case, though. They probably just wanted a written statement from you to satisfy their need to categorize the damage under the "covered by valid LDW" category. Once they received that from you, it was filed properly and the case was closed.
