How not to get dinged

If you’ve ever put a dent or ding on a rental car, you know the drill. The paperwork. The insurance claims. And the often outrageous repair bills.

Sometimes, customers even end up with a nasty form letter from a company threatening to report them to a collection agency if they don’t pay up, pronto.

It’s almost always a scam, of course. Repair bills are routinely inflated by hundreds of dollars — a tidy and completely illegal profit.

In the meantime, how do you avoid getting stuck with a ridiculous car repair bill? Here are three tips, which came to me courtesy of several car rental insiders who I’ve spoken with recently:

1. Bring a camera and take plenty of pictures. Walk around your vehicle and take photos when you pick the car up and when you drop it off. If there’s an accident, snap away. These photos are your own evidence, and if there is a dispute during the repair process, you’ll want to refer to them.

2. Get an independent repair estimate. The car rental company will insist that it is irrelevant, but don’t pay any attention to it. If its own repair bill is hundreds of dollars higher, then it will most certainly matter — perhaps not to your car rental company, but to a court of law.

3. Hire a lawyer and copy the authorities on your correspondence. A car rental company or one of the companies it hires to handle damage collections will either settle with you or abandon its claim if you do the following: First, hire an attorney to handle all the correspondence between you and the rental firm. Second, copy the state attorney general (here’s a listing of state AGs). And third, copy the state insurance commission or state board of insurance in the state in which you rented and the state in which the rental company is based.

Good luck — and here’s hoping you never need to use these tips.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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