Imagine you live in Manhattan and don’t have a car, so you rent one for a road trip. You haven’t gotten any further than Ohio when you see blue lights in your rearview. You dutifully pull over. Then the guns come out and the shouting begins: “Driver! Shut the car off and step out!”

You’d be terrified. And so was a driver who spoke with NBC New York anonymously. She says she complied with all the police demands and told officers, “I’m so scared!” But the Geauga County Sheriff’s Office wasn’t messing around, and the officers treated her like a hardened criminal with a history of auto theft.

Then they just told her it was all a big mistake.

Her Avis rental car had once been reported stolen. Eight months earlier, the vehicle itself had been removed from the list of stolen vehicles. But for some reason, this Ohio department still had its license plate number down as “reported stolen.”

An epidemic of wrongful rental car driver arrests

Daniel Whitney Jr. is an attorney who represents folks wrongly pulled over in rental cars. He feels the problem either starts when rental car companies are too quick to file a stolen car report for a late vehicle return or—worse yet—just lose track of a car in their own fleet.

The problem extends far beyond Ohio. “It is a nationwide issue, 100 percent.”

He understands the logistics of running a rental company is daunting: “What you’ve got are inventories of thousands of vehicles going state to state, multiple states.” But he adds that the rental companies may have skewed priorities. “I get the sense that the priority is more so processing things quickly than processing them carefully.”

Hertz learned this lesson the hard way when 300 customers who’d been wrongly arrested banded together and sued the company. Hertz had to pay out $169 million to the victims. Hopefully, other companies will take the hint and invest more in double-checking their data.

The Manhattan driver arrested in Ohio agrees. “A whole process needs to change so they do not have police pulling people over for no reason.”