How Crime Flourishes on Turo

New Year’s Day 2025 brought two terrorist attacks.

The first involved a Ford F-150 driving down Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 and injuring dozens. The perpetrator was allegedly inspired by ISIS and died during the event.

A second involved a Tesla Cybertruck exploding outside a Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, killing only the alleged perpetrator. His motive was less clear. While the incidents seem to have been unrelated, both vehicles were rented using the same tool: Turo, the peer-to-peer car rental platform.

“We do not believe that either renter involved … had a criminal background that would have identified them as a security threat,” a spokesperson for Turo told CNN on January 1, 2025. “We remain committed to maintaining the highest standards in risk management, thanks to our world-class trust and safety technologies and teams that include experienced former law enforcement professionals.”

Turo’s unique business model lets anyone with a car rent out their vehicle to anyone with a driver’s license.

A month later, Krisztian Riez, a resident of Calgary, headed across the border to Montana to pick up a friend at a regional airport. His goddaughter, who was six months old at the time, didn’t come at the last minute because she got the flu. He rented the car, a 2015 silver Dodge Grand Caravan, on Turo.

Riez was stopped by Border Patrol, who found over 300 micrograms of fentanyl residue around the car, including enough within arm’s reach of where his goddaughter’s car seat would have been to kill the child. “I was freaking out,” Riez said.

Border Patrol ripped through all of Riez’s things, swabbed his hands, and searched his background and social media. After a few hours, they realized he wasn’t a drug smuggler, so they let him go.

“I don’t even do pot, which is legal in Canada,” Riez said. “I’m just a parent with two kids trying to live a clean, healthy life, but I was blown away.”

Riez filed a lawsuit against Turo in California court that got moved to federal court in August.

A spokesperson for Turo declined to comment for this story.

Turo’s unique business model lets anyone with a car rent out their vehicle to anyone with a driver’s license, with unclear criteria for approval for both the renters and the car owners.

Cars rented out through Turo have been involved in armed high-speed chases, armed robbery of U.S. Postal Service workers, gold bar scams targeting the elderly, and even alleged attempts to fraudulently sell the rented vehicles as one’s own.

The company’s “platform” model enables it to attempt to both disclaim being a rental company yet also seek to gain all of the benefits. At San Francisco International Airport, the company is facing lawsuits over avoiding permits because it claims to be a platform.

And in New York, Turo’s lobbying yielded dramatic reductions in the liability insurance it needs to hold, cutting its overhead costs.

“In some respects, Turo works like a rental car company, but in many more respects it operates more like Airbnb,” said David Hitsky, managing director and partner at L.E.K. Consulting, referring to the home-share company that attempted to avoid hotel laws in New York City. “Because the auto insurance market is more regulated, they have to be more responsible for things that Airbnb does not.”

Gaps for Guests

Turo requires drivers, called guests, to upload a picture of their driver’s license. But Turo allows for car owners, called hosts, to rent out their car “contactless,” meaning that if the driver and host agree, the guest could never be required to verify that they are, in fact, the person on the driver’s license.

“I could have given a fake ID,” Riez said of his Turo rental, which was picked up contactless for the convenience of not having to wait around for the host in a parking lot.

Because Turo operates peer-to-peer, guests do not have to go to a specific location where traditional car rental companies operate, like an airport or a hotel. And Turo only requires that guests be over the age of 18, not 25, as with traditional car rental companies. “Younger drivers tend to be less experienced drivers, and there’s a greater danger in having them on the road,” New York state Assemblyman Edward Ra (R) noted last June.

Finally, while Turo does offer third-party risk protection coverage for hosts through Travelers Insurance, it does not require guests to have any insurance in order to rent out a vehicle. While this allows for guests without cars of their own to utilize the service, it also eliminates the crucial moment where many traditional car rental companies get background information on customers: when they purchase a car insurance plan. (Purchasing insurance is not mandatory for auto rentals, and many credit cards offer supplemental car rental insurance coverage.)

Car insurance companies like Progressive, Allstate, and State Farm conduct basic background checks on potential customers to adjust rates based on risk of accident, according to Brett Horn, an analyst at Morningstar who covers Travelers and other insurers. In extreme cases, such checks are used to deny coverage.

Anonymous Reddit forums suggest that Turo’s in-house background check system is inconsistent or sometimes absent. Some guests and hosts have been banned from the app for minor offenses from decades ago, while active felons on parole have not, these anonymous and unverified Reddit comments claim.

Without requiring background checks, or in-person customer verification, or even the typical rental minimum age limit, guests can easily avoid basic stopgaps that other rental car companies use to prevent risky behavior and violent crime.

These factors make Turo a potential haven “for some kind of fraud … people are renting vehicles that don’t either have proper insurance, an up-to-date license, a non-suspended license, anything like that,” said New York state Assemblyman Michael Durso (R) last June. “We don’t know who else is going to be driving it.”

Hoops for Hosts

When Calgary resident Riez reached out to the host of the fentanyl-laced Dodge Caravan over Turo, the owner played dumb, Riez said. At the same time, the owner refused an offer to have the vehicle cleaned.

The host, which goes under the name ProLux Rentals on Turo, could not be contacted for this story.

“It was a very peculiar way of responding,” he said. “Then, they charged me a cleaning fee a couple days later, anyway.”

Riez tried to leave a negative review to publicize what happened, but it was taken down, he alleged. Even the low-star rating was removed. He claims that the car remains on the platform but with a different license plate.

Turo initially offered Riez a few hundred dollars to compensate for the incident. “You know when things don’t feel right in your gut?” he asked. “I just told you guys the problem, and you guys didn’t restrict the vehicle at all … And the underwriter, Travelers, is allowing this to happen.”

Turo has no independent policies or procedures in place to inspect or ensure safety, soundness, or even cleanliness of a host’s vehicle listed on its platform, Assemblyman Ra said last June.

“I don’t think Turo does a very in-depth check of the roadworthiness of the vehicles that they put on their platform,” said Mike Cerasa, a partner at Romanucci & Blandin, one of the law firms suing Turo’s underwriter, Travelers, over the New Orleans New Year’s Day killing. “It’s like similar to how Uber and Lyft get around being employers. The business model is intentionally designed to be hands off and uninvolved.” That affects both hosts and guests.

Insurance Ambiguity

Turo offers both hosts and guests a separate risk protection plan through Travelers Insurance, but that isn’t technically an insurance plan, Hitsky said. It more closely resembles a warranty you’d buy on a TV at Best Buy, without the plan-based background check. And of course, all of these Travelers products for both hosts and guests are optional.

Because it’s not their fleet of vehicles, Turo can attempt to disclaim liability for any accident that happens from vehicles and trips placed on its platform, Hitsky said. Instead, injured persons seeking to be made whole would be better suited pursuing their own insurance claim. While hosts are required to have some car insurance to put their vehicles on Turo, they do not have to acquire Turo’s Travelers products.

“That’s where [Turo and Travelers] first go for insurance, the host’s policy,” Hitsky said. “That’s where they’re hoping most of the costs get eaten.”

Turo and Travelers are facing another lawsuit in Texas federal court over alleged insurance fraud stemming from these products (as well as subsequent arbitration rigging).

The insurance products Travelers sells to Turo customers likely bring in big revenues because they are so rarely utilized for a claim, Hitsky said. However, Travelers likely has to pay Turo to maintain that position as the sole insurance offering on Turo’s site, Morningstar’s Horn noted.

Of Travelers’ $6.6 billion business insurance revenue for the fourth quarter of 2025, Turo is only a sliver of a sliver of that revenue within its $348 million National Accounts line, according to a January 21 earnings release. The National Accounts line holds a Travelers subsidiary, Constitution State Services, a portion of which is Turo’s fee-based revenue.

Travelers did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the Constitution State Services’ revenue figures, much less its revenue earned from Turo, were not broken out.

(Public filings from Turo could have better disclosed the nature of their insurance offering expenses and revenue. Turo contemplated going public and filed initial documentation with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2022 but ultimately backed out a year ago. In October, the company earned $1 billion in revenue and was book valued at $3 billion, according to Forbes.)

While many credit cards offer some supplemental car insurance, they often exclude peer-to-peer car rentals like Turo because of the elevated risks associated with the business model, New York state Assemblyman Josh Jensen (R) noted in June.

If there is an auto accident using a Turo vehicle and it’s not the host’s fault, the stack of insurance coverage generally follows as such, according to Hitsky: a guest’s personal auto insurance (if they have it), a guest’s credit card (if they have a credit card that covers it), then a guest’s (optional) purchased insurance product. From there, any outstanding money owed will tap into a host’s personal auto insurance policy, then a host’s (optional) purchased insurance product, and then finally, Turo’s own corporate insurance pool, courtesy of Travelers, as well as the supplemental corporate reinsurance backstop.

For mass casualty events like in New Orleans, with 32 plaintiffs and allegations that caused billions of dollars in personal and property damage, the whole insurance stack could be utilized.

Turo should be legally accountable as owners of the vehicles listed on their platform, Cerasa argued. “In this day and age, the law has not caught up to the business model,” he added. “Turo, in its unique business model, sets up insurance and dissociates itself.”

New York State of Liability

In 2021, New York state opened the doors for Turo and other potential peer-to-peer car lending networks to operate in the state by passing a law that set a minimum insurance liability threshold at $1.25 million for vehicles.

This means that for every Turo vehicle rented in New York state, the company and Travelers would have to collectively set aside up to $1.25 million in potential insurance payouts to cover the costs of any damage, injury, or death resulting from any accident that would be the fault of the driver or owner of the vehicle. For standard rental cars in New York, that insurance threshold is $25,000, and for app-based ridesharing vehicles like Uber and Lyft, it’s $75,000.

This minimum rate was by far the highest in the country, with no other state exceeding $75,000. The threshold was negotiated in 2021 between Turo and the state insurance regulator, the New York Department of Financial Services, Assemblyman David Weprin (D) noted last June during floor debate.

In December, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed a law reducing that threshold to $75,000 for individuals and up to $150,000 for two or more persons. This still kept New York (along with Oregon) as requiring the highest minimum liability insurance for peer-to-peer vehicles, but the reduction of 94 percent translates into enormous savings for Turo and other peer-to-peer rental firms. Weprin and state Sen. James Skoufis (D) co-sponsored the bills.

The bill passed the New York State Assembly in June, 102-42, with six absences (including then-Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani). A week later, it passed the Senate 58-1 with four absences. Assemblymembers Durso, Jensen, and Ra voted nay.

The new law “will ultimately make using such vehicles more affordable for consumers,” Hochul said when signing the bill into law. “This bill will bring such requirements more in line with other states while still providing adequate protections to consumers.”

With a lower threshold, competitors to Turo like Getaround will re-enter the New York market after exiting the U.S. entirely last February, Weprin argued in June. Getaround did not respond to requests for comment.

The lowered threshold will also cut down on “extreme costs, fraud, and staged accidents,” Weprin said. Weprin did not cite any instances of staged accidents using peer-to-peer rented vehicles.

Since $75,000 would not sufficiently cover a traumatic personal injury, the victim would be forced to access costly health care coverage, potentially increasing health insurance rates for everyone else, Jensen noted in floor debate.

“It makes absolutely no sense to lower the insurance coverage requirements for peer-to-peer car-sharing when the data demonstrates that these rental platforms see more crashes than traditional rental car companies,” Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal (D) told the Prospect on why she voted against the bill. “New Yorkers deserve adequate protection if they are ever involved in a crash with a vehicle rented through one of these platforms, but this bill trades in that consumer safety and financial protection for the benefit of a billion-dollar tech company.”

The bill also included a provision requiring Turo and those like it to offer voluntary supplemental liability insurance, a product the company already offers. But the law confirms that those products are voluntary.

The Department of Financial Services, which regulates the state’s insurance market, should have commissioned a study on the heightened risks associated with peer-to-peer car lending business models, Jensen argued.

“Turo, Uber, and Lyft have been working hard in all states to get their liability insurance limits reduced and more in line with rental car companies,” Cerasa said. “This is a very bad thing for consumers and does nothing to help health and safety of the public.”

Turo spent $435,000 in 2025 alone on lobbying New York state lawmakers on the bill, according to New York State Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government records. Co-sponsors Weprin and Skoufis and their staffers were on the direct receiving end of about $195,000 of that lobbying effort.

Last month, Turo even deployed their in-house lobbyists, Laura Manno and Kenny Montilla, to register as lobbyists in New York state for the year 2026 at a rate of $112 an hour for an estimated 157 hours this year.

In the 2024 election, auto insurance industry members gave Weprin at least $31,890, including two of his top four listed donors, according to Follow the Money, an Open Secrets subsidiary tracking state campaigns. Skoufis received just $6,300 in auto insurance industry donations last cycle.

Partnership for New York City, a pro-business lobby in New York state, listed the bill in a September report on excessive litigation as a way of tackling New York’s affordability crisis.

Instead of lowering the minimum insurance liability threshold, the state thresholds should be raised for all cars, regardless of ownership type or business model, Ceresa said.

“If you can cheaply rent someone’s vehicle, use it for a crime and knowing you won’t be on the hook for anything major on the insurance side of it, it certainly makes it more attractive to do this peer-to-peer, versus going through a traditional rental vehicle,” Assemblyman Ra said.