China's car-sharing industry has come under the spotlight for being used as a tool by people for criminal purposes. 

There have been three charges involving five people using shared vehicles to commit robbery or cause traffic accidents and dangerous driving cases at the People's Procuratorate of Tianning District, Changzhou, East China's Jiangsu Province, since January 2019.

"In handling the cases, we found that problems such as lax auditing and supervision existed in the whole industry," Huang Changwu, a deputy director of the People's Procuratorate of Tianning District, was quoted as saying in a report in the Legal Daily. 

Though car-sharing registration systems normally ask users to upload their driving licenses, ID cards and give deposits in advance, it is possible for users to take other people's personal information to go through the authentication process. 

Photo/Shetuwang

Minors can even use adults' registered accounts to access a car, creating the potential for danger and risk of criminal conduct. 

In December last year, three suspects prepared daggers, masks, cellotape, rope, and rented a car through a mobile phone app to track down a kidnapping target, but were caught by police on the way.

Traffic accidents caused by dangerous driving are another potential safety hazard. 

Cai Junfeng, another prosecutor of the People's Procuratorate of Tianning District, found that dangerous and illegal driving is common in car-sharing, and sometimes leads to serious injuries and casualties.  

However, these actions are not recorded in the car-sharing user database, which means that dangerous drivers with criminal records are not filtered out.

The problem for car-sharing platforms not only comes from the lack of strict supervision over registration, but also in the reckless use of vehicles, responsibility claims and other issues.

"Some customers don't take care of the interior of the car, with cigarette butts, toilet paper and cigarette boxes littering the inside. It's not uncommon for car accessories to be damaged. Some even rip out the fire extinguisher from the car," a head of a car-sharing rental company was quoted as saying by Legal Daily.   

"We don't do a good job in supervision and risk control. Although all shared cars are equipped with positioning devices, there are weak controls and inefficient learning about suspicious behaviors such as repeated driving at night or driving to remote areas," the head of the company said. 

At the same time, "we failed to detect those users with violent tendencies and poor driving records in a timely manner," he added.

Zhang Juntao, a deputy chief procurator of the People's Procuratorate of Tianning District, suggested that car rental companies increase and upgrade monitoring and recording equipment, deploying more face recognition authentication mechanisms and expanding customer information data immediately. For customers with criminal records who are not dealt with in a timely manner, the prosecutor suggests that their accounts be frozen immediately.

Email: lansuying@nbd.com.cn