Originally Posted by
jackal
Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
This is poor programming by Hertz. It makes for a much more sensationally click-baity headline to claim that it's a scam, but the reality is that Hertz's IT is crap and auto-applies charges like this when various conditions are met that it shouldn't.
While you can argue that Hertz's bad IT is in and of itself an act of malice (for their refusal to fix the problems), the reality is that in a big bureaucratic company like Hertz, small-scale issues that pop up like this are hard to get fixed because the dev teams may not even be aware of the problem, and communication between front-line and CS and dev is often not very fluid.
I am generally a fan of Hanlon’s razor… but
There is certainly a lot of “stupidity” involved with Hertz processes; what else could explain that they kept having renters falsely arrested for auto theft even after it became a big news story? But certain changes such as it handing out return receipts and delaying emails (or not sending them at all) look very much like they are designed to make it hard for customers to verify that the correct amount is charged. At some point, not fixing your it problems that cause problems for customers is not stupidity, but rather malice.