Six months after renting a car from the Hertz location at Zurich International Airport, I received a mysterious $49 bill on my credit card.

The bill is apparently for the cost of Hertz providing my name and address to authorities for a traffic violation:

That email with my name & address must’ve taken quite some time to write if it costs $49, but I’m not really surprised by that.

Here is where it gets weird.

They provided the date of the alleged penalty:

Okay, so I must have gotten hit by a red-light camera or something on 9.14 right?

Thing is, I wasn’t even in Switzerland from 9.11 through 9.16.

We rented the car on 9.10, immediately drove down to Italy, then didn’t return to Switzerland until 9.17 when we brought back the car.

Even if the “issue date” was somehow a few days late, I was only driving in Switzerland for a total of about six hours, during which I didn’t run any red lights or get any tickets.

I didn’t even park the car in Switzerland, except once in a public parking area, in a tiny town on a lake, surrounded by mountains.

Sherlock, where you at?

I’ll be sure to update this post with any developments.

Please let me know if you have any clues!

*Update: My brother worked at Hertz, so I asked him about this. He said employees don’t make a commission on fees, so there isn’t any motivation for front-line employees to make up a charge like this. Did I uncover a high-level scam? Or did Swiss police just issue a late penalty after I got too excited about Italy and sped on the way down there?