Being screwed over by a car hire company for damage I didn't cause

Yeah, I've been in correspondence with the head office for some time. A month after the rental they sent me a letter asking for an "accident damage report". I told them that I had not been in an accident, that the damage was pre-existing, and therefore I couldn't give them one.

They didn't bother to respond to my denials that the damage was caused by me. They also didn't bother to respond about my numerous complaints about things like downgrading my vehicle. Instead, a month later they just sent me this massive invoice which I suspect has been inflated 5 to 10x.

Their refusal to respond to letters and willingness to just send out massive invoices suggests to me that they're trying their luck and sending out invoices to people that they know didn't do it and hoping that they'll just pay up to make it go away.

As far as I can see the only way you can have this kind of scrape is a parking accident in a car park at 1 or 2 mph. But I did no city driving, I drove direct from the airport to the auobahn (about 1/2 mile), went 40 miles down the autobahn and then parked 1/2 mile from the autobahn in a rural area in a forest. The car was only in my possession for about 8 hours.

There was no paperwork no. All I had to do was sign the electronic device on the desk - much like the thing that couriers tend to give you nowadays to sign for a parcel. There was certainly nothing about any damage that I had to sign for or otherwise authorise.

The more I think about this the more I think that this is set up to bamboozle customers. I must have hired at least 20-30 vehicles, everything from Corsas to 3.5 ton Lutons from other companies, and have never had the slightest problem before. All other times I've walked around the vehicle with the representative of the hire company and marked on a piece of paper where the damage was.

If you do a google search for "<car hire company name> scam" you get a rather shocking number of reports of fairly similar complaints about the company, enough to suggest that they try to pull this off on a regular basis.

The repair bill for the above scrape, they claim, is just a few euros short of 1500 EUR. I think that they're taking the piss.

Sorry to bring up an old thread, but I thought I'd update on this, nearly a year late! I didn't want to put too much information in the public domain at the time, but I appreciate the comments.

So yes, I hired the car from Europcar (good guess!). I had a disagreement with the check in people when I returned the car due to the above damage, which I fully disputed. Europcar then sent me an invoice for EUR 0.00 saying something like "nothing further payable."

After that they sent a first letter demanding around 1000 EUR which included replacing the bumper - you can see it's not damaged in the slightest! I told them to bugger off - they then sent a second letter, again demanding around 1000 EUR. I sent them a scan of the invoice showing 0.00 EUR payable, again telling them to bugger off, including numerous complains about the hire. Trying to claim for a new bumper is simply fraudulent.

I've heard nothing since.

So, lessons are:

a) Be very very very very careful when renting a car - even when you thought you were careful.

b) Never hire from Europcar

c) Dispute the damage, take photographic evidence (I did) and use their crapness against them

I've had some great hires from Hertz in the mean time from the same airport (Berlin Schoenefeld) - including getting upgraded from an Opel Meriva at an already dirt cheap price for a 4 day hire to an InfinIti FX (luxury Nissan 4x4 - complete chelsea tractor, but great for cruising on the autobahn) for only 10 EUR The Opels are really under powered and really drink petrol at about 90mph on the autobahn.