boycotting Turo, the car rental app
Turo is an app where you rent a car from local people, allowing you to get on the road quickly, instead of having to find a rental company that might be far away or closed. It's convenient. However, I've been trying to get a refund from Turo for over 4 months now for a charge that is not my responsibility. I want to wipe my hands of this, cancel my account, and swear off these shady crooks forever. Let me break down the timeline of events:
May 23, 2025: I visit Denver, Colorado and rent a car from some guy through the Turo app. I take it from Denver to Colorado Springs, which means I have to take a toll road. No big deal - the driver will invoice me when he gets the toll bill, and I'll pay it then.
July 9, 2025: The owner of the car sends me an additional invoice through the app for the "toll fees" totaling $69.01!!!! He also sends me the PDF of the bill, which has a total balance of $583.01 (an insanely large toll bill) and 2 line items labelled "Civil Penalty," totaling $50. So the bill would have been $19.01 without these penalty fees. Here's an image of the invoice. As you can see in the yellow circle, it states his balance is past due.
July 11, 2025: I call the Denver toll company and give them the invoice number, and they tell me that this man hasn't paid his bill since 2024 (WHAT), an entire year before I even rented the car.
So in summary, some absolute snake of person tried to pull a fast one and offload his late fees onto me because I just happened to drive through a toll road. I also found online evidence that "civil penalty" does in fact imply "late fee." Here's a link to the Colorado toll website which explains this.
I sent all this evidence to Turo many, many, many times. I must have been on the phone or in a text chat with at least a dozen customer service agents at this point. Some said they can't help me, some said they'll escalate the issue and I will receive a call back (I never heard back), and some just blatantly lied to me and said they processed the refund and I will see it in my bank in 3-4 business days (I never saw that money come back).
Also important to note that the entire Turo customer support team is offshore and doesn't have the power to actually issue refunds. The dozen people I spoke to were not really interested in helping and cannot put you in contact with the escalated support team. I'm convinced it's all an intentional scam to make people so frustrated, they quit trying to resolve their issues.
In desperation, I issued a chargeback on my credit card after Turo refused to help. My credit card originally issued my money back, and Turo retaliated by banning me. But later my credit card company denied the dispute, reverted the issued credit, and Turo magically re-instated my account. My credit card told me to take it up with the legal system (lol).
I also can't leave the owner of the vehicle a bad review because you only get 1 week to leave a review, so I can't warn future renters about this snake.
My last resort was to file a report with the Better Business Bureau. We'll see if anything comes from that, but I doubt it. Fuck this company.
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