Car Hire - too good to be true?

dacouch

Gossi if you have home insurance you will have free legal advice via a normal priced phone call, if you look in your policy booklet it's generally on the same page as the normal claim phone number.

gossi

I'm not owed any money, I'm just here trying to help you folk out as I know the infrastructure for dealing with fraud companies in the UK is, uhm, sadly lacking.

sussex1_2

I was under the impression Gossi that you had had some contact with this company and had been caught up in th same scam?
Did you try and hire a car and not go through with it?

gossi wrote: »

I'm not owed any money, I'm just here trying to help you folk out as I know the infrastructure for dealing with fraud companies in the UK is, uhm, sadly lacking.

gossi

Nope. I only started looking at it because I saw The Guardian article just before Christmas, and was curious as the excuses RentMeAnyCar gave in the article didn't add up.

sussex1_2

Sorry to hear of another person caught in this scam.

Can you advise as to dates for the events below and when you were able to secure your refund and by what means i.e. cheque, re-credit to your bank account etc.
You appear to be one of only a handful of people to have got some monies refunded, it is strange as to why in some instances they have refunded monies.

It is strange also that in some instances they allowed people to make credit card payments (I was advised that this was not possible) and have actually refunded monies back on to certain cards whilst making other people to BACS transfers.

I am sure that the police would be interested in tracking these payments. Perhaps the banks will take a greater interest in these transcations as thay have had to credit the losses back to the applicable parties.

In terms of reporting etc I would suggest that you use the telephone number and crime reference provided by The Guardian listed in some of the earlier blogs.

hammy8677 wrote: »

We have also just been done by Rentmac , I spoke to several people on setting up car rental.
Luckily they let us down earlier enough as could have been worse.
we'd paid £204 which we managed to get refunded. They agreed to pay towards next car rental costs and refund deposit of £500.
Some of this was done on phone and other bits on e-mail.
I will have to check notes I made at time but do remember speaking to Lee Stevens, Andrew Ryan, Phil Thompson (area manager?) and a lady called me about agreed refund refused to give her name ????.
On returning from Holiday no refund of deposit as had been promised and no cheque to cover replacement car hire that they agreed to cover.
I thought this was strange when I was unable to get contact numbers for supervisers or company linked e-mail addresses as they claim it's so they can all deal with it rather than just one person.

I also queried how long they had been set up and Andrew told me he'd worked for them for 10 years, It was a proper office etc etc

I may not have lost as much as some but please let me know best ways to report, and who to as this may increase chances of a conviction for these fraudsters

sussex1_2

gossi wrote: »

Nope. I only started looking at it because I saw The Guardian article just before Christmas, and was curious as the excuses RentMeAnyCar gave in the article didn't add up.

Gossi, it is great that you have taken an interest in this and thank you for your assistance to date, we have all gathered so much information in such a short time that will be of assistance in pursuing this company (by the police, The Guardian, FT and individuals like Cort and others).

I hope that The Guardian take note of this forum and the stories that have been posted to date. Lets see what they come up with over the course of the next few days.

gossi

Does anybody have the email addresses from the emails they received FROM rentmac/rentmeanycar?

hammy8677

Payment made via Egg credit card 8/12/10 £704.40.

£204.40 refund payment to egg card 10/12/10 this was for cost of rental.

They said they couldn't refund deposit as would collect us for our return journey.
After lots of various calls they agreed to pay my new rental costs (334.81) via cheque but i'd have to sign a letter to say no further action would be taken. Also Andrew Ryan said refund payment would be made same day 13/12 or at latest the following day 14/12

This I feel was to give them more time knowing I was going on a cruise and unable to follow it up. I had threatened legal action and maybe the only reason they refunded some costs was to enable them to get the bigger money in.

I rented through rentmeanycar.com

Egg statement has transactions listed as :

RENT ME ANY CAR LONDON W1J

I will try to find leads and chase this up. I presume I will manage to get my deposit back from Egg but unlikely to get the further £334.81 that had been agreed.

I shall post if I get any responses from e-mials I have sent to them.

sussex1 wrote: »

Sorry to hear of another person caught in this scam.

Can you advise as to dates for the events below and when you were able to secure your refund and by what means i.e. cheque, re-credit to your bank account etc.
You appear to be one of only a handful of people to have got some monies refunded, it is strange as to why in some instances they have refunded monies.

It is strange also that in some instances they allowed people to make credit card payments (I was advised that this was not possible) and have actually refunded monies back on to certain cards whilst making other people to BACS transfers.

I am sure that the police would be interested in tracking these payments. Perhaps the banks will take a greater interest in these transcations as thay have had to credit the losses back to the applicable parties.

In terms of reporting etc I would suggest that you use the telephone number and crime reference provided by The Guardian listed in some of the earlier blogs.

landsberger64

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.

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.

Let's not solely have a pop at the Guardian here - The FT were similarly taken in, and haven't come in for nearly as much stick. Both the Guardian AND the FT were similarly fooled, which must give some indication as to the slickness of this operation, and as they are owned by separate companies, this is doubly the case.

If all companies refused adverts for companies only incorporated a couple of months ago, traders would be screaming unfair terms and conditions. The Guardian and FT are in a cleft stick. We then come to the issue of how much due diligence papers, including the Guardian and FT need to exercise. I do wonder if there'd be the same fuss if this were the Sun, their pages and pages of extremely dubious moneylenders notwithstanding.

gossi

RENT ME ANY CAR LONDON W1J... That's the London virtual office address again. I didn't realise they had billed credit cards. That indicates they also have a credit card payment processor set up. That will be another paper trail.

I think the common theme on refunds from them at the time, from what I can see at least, is the people who threatened legal action or the police. They likely wanted to keep the 'business' ticking over for as long as possible (which involves keeping the police from investigating) so they could get maximum funds through the accounts and transferred out elsewhere. So refunding small amounts, in their own interest.

I still think this operation will have scammed a lot of money. I bet there's loads of people out there who are still phoning them up and trying to email them, threatening going to Watchdog etc.