Car Hire - too good to be true?

Gilly-ray

We are having a nightmare with Halifax. They say they can't do anything to help us because they sent the BACS through their Faster Payment scheme.
Has anyone been able to get their payments reversed? We have written to the financial ombudsman to ask for advice.

gossi

Halifax would be very unlikely to refund the money; they would have to pay for it themselves. BACS transfers can be stopped within 24 hours of being started, but after the money clears it is gone. So either Natwest or HSBC have/had it (depending on if RentMeAnyCar withdrew or transferred it elsewhere). Sorry to be depressing.

StuieUK34

Any Updates >?

Sjko

Has anyone tried contacting echosign?

sussex1_2

I note that contact had been made with Mark Finney at The Guardian and that a meeting was held earlier this week.
Has any further contact been made to seek the outcome of this meeting?

Are you proposing to call back?

Freesoho

I've been away for a few days so not sure what developments have occured lately.
I did an interview with Guardian Money yesterday (Patrick was calling a few of us I think) so my plan from here is to speak again with Mark Finney tomorrow for an update from him and see what the paper has to say on Saturday.
I think there is no hope (in my case anyway) of recovering funds with the assistance of Natwest. They are not interested in helping and it would take way too much of my time to pursue it with them.
The police may eventually catch up with these guys but we're talking months, maybe years here.
My greatest hope at the moment is that the Guardian, FT etc put together a compensation package for those of us that relied on their good name and resources to ensure Rentmac were reputable. A strange position for Guardian Money to be in as I suspect they feel that The Guardian is (partly) culpable here. Let's see what Saturday's Guardian brings.

Surrey1_2

I was caught out on this one too - booked and paid on 20/12 for delivery on 24/12, and of course the 4 x 4 never turned up. I would never normally pay by bank transfer for a future service but the combination of Guardian advert and lack of poor press on Google at the time were sufficiently persuasive. I bank with First Direct, (closely related to HSBC - I paid the account 6117) and their fraud department did take things up for me, but I understand there are no funds remaining in that account to claim against, so I will be out of pocket. Fortunately Xmas wasn't a write-off as I had contingency travel plans in place and my loss, at £350, seems to be at the lower end of the scale.

I'm still getting through to Rentmac's outsourced reception number 0844 474 4040 (still answering and taking messages) but she's not giving anything away when asked if the company is still trading or if she has had lots of other calls like mine.

It still seems unclear to me if this was a scam from the start or a poor business plan that has swiftly folded. It would be useful to know if there was anyone who actually did get a car, but I suppose, if they did, they wouldn't now be trawling the internet for a site such as this.

gossi

It's definitely a scam. People on the phone were saying they've been in business 4 years, the names they gave The Guardian are false, they aren't VAT registered etc.

It is extremely unlikely The Guardian will admit any liability, as claims could cost them vast sums of money and there's no way to prove any of the claims.

sussex1_2

Gossi, in some ways you are right we have all been the victim of a very well organised scam that includes The Guardian and others.

What is clear though is that during our dealings with this company many of us had reservations as to its legitimacy (address, contracts not being completed correctly, time taken to answer the phone, speaking to the same people etc), principally at the point where we were asked to make direct payments (the fact that many of us tried in the first instance to pay by debit or credit card confirms this and only proceed to pay via BACS in most instances when confronted with the real possibility of not receiving the vehicle on the day of delivery) we took comfort in having seen the advertisement in a national newspaper.

What this did was give the company a degree of credability.
We took for guaranted the fact that the company would have had to have gone through a number of pre-checks before being extended credit for the size of marketing campaign that ensued (The Guardian and the FT etc).

Let us not forget that The Guardian only appear to have been alerted to what was happening when readers of the paper phoned in to register their concerns at being asked to make direct (BACS transfers) into this companies account.

If this had not taken place and we had all paid via credit/debit card I am sure that the scam would have run for that bit longer as we would have all been safe in the knowledge that when the cars failed to materialise we could have claimed our money back (despite the inconvenience of not being able to travel).

I can only assume that by making us pay via BACS it held the banks back from investigating the account(s) directly as they would have been liable for the losses that ensued.

We can only speculate as what checks were undertaken by The Guardian and others but I would like to think that it was far in excess of the checks that you and I might conduct for a simple car hire transaction.

I therefore believe that whilst it may not have a legal obligation to refund or compensate us in part for our respective losses it does have a moral obligation to acknowledge its own failings in not carrying out adequate credit/registration checks on this company before taking its business (a simple check of its company registration would have shown that both companies had only been registered since October of this year). By allowing this advert to run utlimately led many of us to push ahead with our own transactions, indeed for many of us we would not even have come into contact with this company at all if it had not been for the full page adverts.

Perhaps we will find out more from The Guardian in due course as to what they are proposing to do.

dacouch

sussex1 wrote: »

What this did was give the company a degree of credability.
We took for guaranted the fact that the company would have had to have gone through a number of pre-checks before being extended credit for the size of marketing campaign that ensued (The Guardian and the FT etc).

Let us not forget that The Guardian only appear to have been alerted to what was happening when readers of the paper phoned in to register their concerns at being asked to make direct (BACS transfers) into this companies account.

To play devils advocate, saying that you relied on the Guardian and FT credit checking them is not correct as your previous post assumed they had been paid up front.

sussex1 wrote: »

.
Picking up the previous threads whilst it appears to be a scam given the high profile marketing and similar sites the number of reported incidents appears low.

They would have had to have taken a high number of bookings to cover the likely costs of the set-up, we are talking about national newspapers, FT, The Guardian etc (advertisment space - full pages) would have far exceeded the figures quoted to date, they would also likely owe money to google as well so hopefully these companies will be pursuing them in earnest.

I genuinely feel sorry for you being the victim of an elaborate confidence trick but it is important to stick to the facts on MSE. The Guardian and FT have also been taken in by this con so the perpetrators must have had sufficient knowledge to set a trail that would also fool businesses as well as the public.

Please don't shoot the messenger as I'm only playing devils advocate