Woman allegedly rents BMW then ghosts rental company, doesn't pay rent for over 1 week

A car rental company is in search of a customer, who has allegedly refused to return and pay for the BMW sedan that she had rented.

After picking up the car at Kem Auto Leasing & Car Rental on Jan. 27, the female customer had been paying the rent daily until Feb. 26, when she apparently abruptly stopped making payment without returning the car, the company told Mothership.

After falling behind on payment for over a week, she told the car rental company staff to collect the vehicle from her at Singapore General Hospital (SGH) on Mar. 6, but failed to show up.

Frustrated, the company resorted to posting about the situation on Facebook on Mar. 6, seeking help from anyone who might know the woman.

"Anne, if you see this post, please return our car and stop hiding," the firm wrote.

A trusted, long-term customer

The customer, whom the company said is a Sengkang resident named Anne Cecilia, has rented from Kem Auto every one or two months for two years without causing problems.

The company trusted her enough to rent her a car without a GPS tracker.

The company's owner, surnamed Kwan, explained that Anne would usually rent a car on an ad hoc basis, and extend the rental period daily by paying rent by the end of each day.

This means she can basically rent a car for as long as she needed it, unless Kem Auto needed the car back for another customer.

In the past, Anne would not keep a car for more than a week.

For this latest rental, however, she has not returned the BMW sedan for over a month.

Excuses

In mid-February, Anne apparently started to make payment late by three to four days, instead of daily as agreed.

She told Kem Auto that she had some financial issues because her parents were hospitalised.

The rent for the BMW was about S$90 a day, Kwan said.

Given her good past record as a regular customer, the staff did not think about pursuing it further.

But when the delays grew from three days to a week, and she failed to pay despite promising that she would, they started to get suspicious.

They demanded that she returned the car, but she allegedly gave a lot of excuses, according to Kwan.

"She gave us a lot of empty promises," he said.

Despite asking the team to pick the car up at SGH, she allegedly did not show up after saying she was on the way several times.

Kwan also said Anne tried to argue that she knew people who owed S$4,000 to S$5,000 in rent to other car rental companies, yet did not get blacklisted.

After he posted on Facebook, she told the company the next day that she would return the car on Mar. 9, along with the money she owed.

However, she did not show up again, Kwan said.

In the post, Kwan included a screenshot of Anne's supposed Facebook profile.

But the account could not be found on Mar. 10.

What next?

As the car rental company ran out of options, Kwan and his team decided to look for Anne at her house, based on the address she gave in the rental agreement.

When they got there on the morning of Mar. 10, Anne was not around.

She had apparently not been home for the past two days, her mother told Kwan.

She said she would contact them when Anne returned.

In the meantime, Kwan has the option to engage a company to repossess the car.

He has not considered making a police report at the moment, as it would not solve the problem, he said.

He shared that it is relatively common problem for car rental companies to have to chase their customers to pay rent and return the cars.

But many of the car rental firms would have installed a GPS tracker in the vehicles.

This incident has prompted Kwan to be more cautious, he said, and to "enforce" the rule that every car has to have a tracker, he said.

Top images from Kem Auto Leasing & Car Rental/Facebook