JEDDAH, 24 July 2005 — Summer is a busy time for car rental companies, with many families renting vehicles for extended periods for vacation travel. Conmen, deadbeats, thieves and smugglers also try to secure vehicles through the companies, which has prompted the creation of a blacklist to keep criminals out of the driver’s seat.
Muhammad Abdul Qavi, an employee at Al-Khuzama car rental agency, said teenagers are unlikely to get vehicles, noting that the young drivers are hard on the cars and present a high risk to the agency.
Abdul Qavi said it is not uncommon for the teens to present fraudulent working papers in an effort to justify a rental and that sometimes the cars are returned, but the rental agreement is left unsettled.
“When we go to their workplace, we discover that they have left the company,” Abdul Qavi said. “This creates great difficulties for us, and we end up making numerous trips between the renter and government authorities trying to get our payment.”
One employee working in a car rental agency said his company had a blacklist of names that was exchanged with other agencies. “Some of these names are wellknown by most to the companies,” he said.
There are worse things possible than returning the car without payment. “Every week, police discover several rented cars on the border that people are trying to smuggle out of the Kingdom,” the car rental agency employee said.
He said some use the cars to smuggle illegal immigrants or contraband across the Saudi-Yemen border to Jeddah. “They don’t care about the car because it is rented.”
