Car Rental Scam?

Help please - I'm not sure how to handle this? Thoughts are appreciated -

DH and I went to Miami almost a year ago and while there, got into a car accident that was deemed our fault. A car had come speeding around a traffic circle with a guy hanging out the window and we hit them. Their car got a small dent in the passenger side. They had the police come down. My DH was driving - we thought he was insured under his mother - so we didn't take the rental company's insurance. Turns out MIL had not told us the truth so that insurance can't cover the damage. The guy takes the guy to a Ferrari repair shop (he was driving a cheverolet truck!) and comes back to us with an estimate of $1400 which sounded way to high for what needed to be fixed. But I just wanted to get this over with so I said I'd call the shop and pay over the phone. I didn't want to take any chance that he could claim we didn't pay. He didn't like that and said he was going to sue me. Sue us for paying to fix his car!!! Obv he had no plans of bringing it there to be fixed. So I called the car rental's insurance company (who we had been dealing with) and told them all of this. They said they would be the middle man to make things easier and agreed with me that compared to the damage being described and where the car was taken, the estimate was too high. They asked if I wanted them to send their claims adjuster down - so that if the guy deemed the damage as say, $600, that's all we would be responsible for. And we'd pay the insurance company instead of the guy directly so there would be no chance of this coming up again. I said fine, do that. They said they'd call me after the claims adjuster reported back. So almost a year goes by and I don't hear a word. Then yesterday a huge package comes from the insurance company saying that we owe $2200!!! AND, I never got the phone call I was promised in the interim. I don't get it - if the guy submitted an estimate for $1400, even if they decided that's a fair estimate, how could it suddenly become $2200??? DH left a message for the insurance company since none of this makes sense to us.... is there anything i can do? Does this seem logical to you?

Re: Car Rental Scam?

I don't have any answers for you but I will say that when I went to Miami many years ago, I ran into problems with a rental car being broken into...and I later found out that Miami is notorious for tourists getting their cars vandalized, insurance fraud type stuff......

I would explain everything to your own insurance company and the car rental one too and see what to do from there...

Sorry