Payless Car Rental

Our complaint is against Payless Car Rental of Cancun, Mexico. I have called, emailed, and written Payless, Expedia, and Kroger MasterCard numerous times without success of obtaining a refund.
We rented from Payless from 11/21/09 until 11/28. When we returned the car, Payless tried to scam us into paying a large damage amount claiming that we had wrecked the car, which wasn’t true, and despite the fact that there was NO damage.
The scam was obvious and I couldn’t believe they continued to pursue it after I told them nothing happened to the car and I sure wasn’t signing anything that said it had. The car looked great too; but they fussed over it and yanked on the driver’s fender and the bumper. I wondered if they had the fender zip-tied on and they were trying to break it free to make it look damaged. They went immediately to this fender as soon as we drove in, and didn’t check any other part of the car, not even the gas or mileage. The rear end could have been caved in and nobody would have ever even glanced at it. The rental checkout form initially had about 30 tiny dings and scratches marked on it, which led me to believe they would go over the entire car with a fine-toothed comb. But no, just that one corner. Clearly they were up to something.
Additionally; no one would speak to us about the matter after the initial accusations, they just ran off. Every employee I stopped to speak to said we had to speak to the supervisor, who ran away from us more than once, occasionally laughing with other employees that were with him. My family was basically left to stand in the parking lot for 45 minutes wondering what in the world was going on while Payless refused to check us out, or take us to the airport. My wife and children were rightfully frightened and intimidated by this threatening treatment.
I was able to put a stop to this nonsense by announcing to the customers in the lobby that the Payless folks were trying to make me sign a claim against my $3200 deposit on my car, (that was parked right in front of the window where everyone could see it), because they said I had an accident. Well the response was impressive, resulting in people demanding the agents to say if they were" going to do the same thing to them", and "I’m going over to Avis", and "That car sure looks fine to me". Payless then hustled us away in the shuttle with no comment from anyone except the driver who told us to "hurry up" and pushed us into the van. I was literally afraid they were going to take us out to the middle of nowhere and dump us. Instead, he proceeded to drop us at the wrong terminal, which I’m sure was intentional as I had both told him our airline and shown him our printed itinerary with the airline name and logo displayed.
We feel this is a serious matter and that Expedia should not book with this company anymore either, at least in Mexico, and Payless should refund our rental charge. To harass, threaten, frighten, hinder and generally inconvenience customers is no way to do business in any circumstance