Draper woman fights to get Turo host booted after making fraudulent rental car damage claims against her

DRAPER — Imagine returning a rental car without so much as a scratch, but then you get charged hundreds of dollars for damage that was made up — completely fictional.

Hope Orr said an unscrupulous host on the popular peer-to-peer car rental platform, Turo (sort of an Airbnb for car rentals), accused her of returning his car with a screw embedded in a tire. He sent her a photo as proof, but she said it only proves fraud.

"I woke up and discovered that there was a claim against me for a nail in the tire and for smoking in the car," Orr said of the day after she returned from her vacation in Miami.

"Was there a nail in the tire?" we asked her.

"No," she responded.

"Had you been smoking?"

"No," she laughed. "I don't smoke."

When she disputed the charges, that's when the car's owner sent her that photo.

"It was a very close-up photo of a tire with a nail in it," Orr said.

Also included were photos of a lighter on the floorboard, a spot of ash, and some loose tobacco.

"Once I saw that smoking violation, I realized that the tire was fraud," she said.

Turo wasn't convinced.

"They said that they were going to post a $500 charge on my account and that they would get an estimate from the host and then let me know how much it was actually going to cost me," said Orr.

That's on top of the $165 charge she got hit with for the smoking claim.

She said the host tried to pressure her into settling with him directly, instead of through Turo.

"Solving it independently with us … will be cheaper and faster," he texted her.

When she continued to argue, the host sent her more menacing messages.

"You won't be able to get out of this," he warned her in one text. And then in another, "I've done more than 5,000 tire claims in the last nine years. I know what I'm doing and I know what I'm saying."

Orr went back to the one tire photo she did have from the host and compared it to photos she took of the car before dropping it off.

"I realized that the tread on the tires did not match," she said.

When she traced out the tread in the tire in the host's photo, it became clear that these were two different tires.

She sent her side-by-side comparison to Turo.

"About 20 minutes later, I received an email that said that they found his claim to be valid," she said.

Instead of losing hope, Orr kept digging and found a smoking gun. She did a reverse image search online and up popped the very same photo with a screw in it that was being used against her, only not as cropped in as close. It's from a Reddit post from years ago.

The photo is wide enough to show the tire is bolted onto an entirely different model of car than the one she rented.

With that, Turo finally relented and removed the bogus claims.

"This is a lot bigger than me and tire claim," Orr told us.

She is dismayed that the man who boasted about filing thousands of tire claims is still renting cars on Turo. His fleet of 13 cars has been rented out over 6,600 times.

Orr said she reached out to Turo executives. When they didn't respond, she contacted me.

"He's clearly taking advantage of the system and making money off of customers," she said.

She's not out on a limb. Turo's own policy states a host who submits false, altered or misleading info for a claim faces up to a $2,000 fee. They also face getting booted off the platform.

The KSL Investigators contacted Turo to ask about all of this. Not through its customer service but through the public relations team. That shifted Orr's complaints into high gear.

In an email, a spokesperson told us "... incidents like this are rare ...," but when a "host violates community policies and trust by falsifying claims," they're removed from the platform.

"As a gesture of goodwill," wrote Turo, "this guest was refunded in full," for the whole rental.

It was a long road, but fighting the good fight, Orr hopes that's the end of renters being preyed upon by unscrupulous hosts — at least by the guy who tried to take her for a ride.

Whether it's Turo or any car rental company, your best friend is going to be the camera on your smartphone.

Take photos of the car at both pick-up and drop-off. Spend the five to ten minutes it takes to walk around the car and shoot every angle and document everything you can possibly find.

That helped Orr prove her case, and it could save you hundreds, if not thousands, if you get hit with a damage claim later on, legitimate or otherwise.

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