Woman tracks down her own car after she says renter never returned it
By Chase Houle
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ATLANTA (WXIA) — An Atlanta woman is going viral on Instagram after warning others about the risks of renting out their personal vehicles to strangers.
Alexia Wright’s video has racked up 28,000 likes and thousands of shares in just 48 hours. In it, she shares a cautionary tale after renting her car through Turo, an online car-sharing service similar to Airbnb.
“My main thing is just making sure people are aware of these types of situations and that ultimately, it’s not cool to do this to people who work hard for the business. Bottom line,” Wright said.
Wright said her car was rented out as scheduled, but the person who had it stopped responding and failed to return the vehicle on time.
“I contacted them trying to see what time they were returning the car and they kept giving me the runaround and so I kind of let it go a couple more days, like four or five days, and that’s when it triggered me to go see what was going on with the car,” she said.
After days went by without it being returned, Wright decided to take matters into her own hands. Using a GPS monitoring system installed in the vehicle, she tracked down its location.
“When I pulled up, after so long, I was like, no, I’m going to call the police. Like, I need my car back at this point,” Wright said.
She said police responded, detained the driver and helped her recover her vehicle. While she considers herself fortunate, Wright wants to use her situation to help others.
“Make sure you divorce your car. Make sure you’re not married to it. Make sure you have trackers on your car so that if something happens, you can recover it and you need to make sure that you’re ready if your car ever goes off the lot, you’re ready for it not to come back at some point,” she said.
Wright doesn’t advise people to take things into their own hands when dealing with these types of situations, but instead let police retrieve your car back.
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