In 2012 I rented a car from Hertz at the Palermo airport, and returned it a month later to the Palermo Airport, after traveling 1085 km. Months after I had returned to the United States I received a notice from NiviCredit requesting payment for a parking violation in ROME, issued within the time frame of my rental. Rome is 929 km away from Palermo (round trip 1858 km), thus it is out of the question that the car I rented was in Rome while rented to me.
I am still struggling with this, most recently with Cedar Financial out of Calabasas, Ca.
I wonder: is there collusion between unscrupulous traffic cops and car rental agencies? Or is this a case of cloned licence plates, as suggested by Rif (see the comment below)? I'd like to get to the bottom of this, and I have started a blog documenting my case in the hope that others would help understand what is going on.
http://pettythieves.blogspot.com/
I would appreciate the help of other innocent victims.
Posted by
Rick Steves' Europe
16895 posts
I doubt that contesting the ticket will be easy, but if you still have hotel receipts or credit card statements, those might help confirm your whereabouts.
Posted by
Oak Park, Illinois
4535 posts
It's possible that the car plate number was incorrectly entered and it just happened to be your car plate.
Parking tickets in the US work on the same premise: you must contest them and show that your vehicle was not illegally parked. Very difficult to prove even when local. Almost impossible from oversees.
Practical questions you may need to address:
Did Hertz charge you an administrative fee for turning over your contact info? That is standard and while you shouldn't have to pay it in this case (if it wasn't your car), not likely going to get much luck in Hertz waiving the fee since it is just administrative. Contesting the charge with your CC won't work because the fee is in the rental agreement.
Who is Cedar Financial? Is that a collection agency? Some people here have reported that unpaid tickets have been turned over to a collection agency.
Not paying runs the risk of the abovementioned collection agency. That would cause more headaches for you then just paying it.
Posted by
Firenze
500 posts
An incorrectly entered number is much more likely than a scam. Declaring this case to be a theft is offensive and probably a form of defamation.
Posted by
Massachusetts
715 posts
Tony sorry this happened to you, this must be really frustrating but, I too, suspect it was clerical error not a band of scumbag parking ticket scammers.
Checking to see if Hertz charged you a service fee is where to start. Documenting you travel and mileage with Hertz should help as well. Contact you credit card immediately and let them know u are contesting the ticket and that they should not pay Hertz the service fee, assuming it has been charged.
Good luck.
PS: I looked at you blog, you are on top of it, and I think you would get more empathy from this crowd if you were not assuming it was petty thieves over clerical error. The ticket was written for a Hyundai, it looks to me like you rented an Aveo. Honestly, Let's assume for an minute that it was a petty thief in Roma, did they just pick some random license plate number and write a ticket for it? Did they work with the Hertz office in Palermo to get a correct license plate number? If the former, they got real lucky. If the latter I think they would be smart enough to write the ticket for someplace you would have more likely travelled in Palermo. Petty thieves does not make sense, clerical error does. Still, it seems you are getting charged for something that you did not do, so fight it, and I hope you win.
Posted by
Paris, France
34 posts
Might be a scam by rogue cops and rental agencies, but more likely someone in Rome has fake plates on their car (to escape Autovelox and ZTL cameras) which happens to be the same as the one on your rental car. This happens also in France, people have been in serious trouble because their plates were duplicated by people who then committed repeated traffic violations. The problem has now been acknowledged by the French authorities, and it is much easier to contest the tickets than it used to be when you're a victim of this kind of "plate number theft".
Posted by
Paris, France
34 posts
I do not really agree with your "guilty until proven innocent" thing : it's the same in the US for citations by traffic/parking cops. Otherwise there would be no way to issue any ticket, how could cops ever prove that a car was parked where they said it was? There aren't cameras everywhere, and even if there were, how much money and how many people would it take to investigate every parking violation?