Before you call an Uber or a Lyft, you'll want to know about 'Vomit Fraud'

Generally, I feel as though Uber and Lyft improved the taxi landscape most places; however, it’s really easy to see degradation in service as they’re trying to become profitable.

The other day I canceled a Lyft because the driver was taking too long. He came up and started screaming at us, swearing at us for canceling. I reported the issue to Lyft as a safety issue: they gave no indication they dealt with the driver: just a $5 coupon and an apology.

I recently wrote on here about the terribly unaccountable process of reporting cabs via TLC in New York. Uber and Lyft are quickly realizing that same level of unaccountability as they realize the reality of scaling such a business. I wonder within this frame whether the improvements to taxi service we’ve seen with Uber were just temporary: disappearing as they scale and become profitable.

I had a similar experience with a rideshare service. My driver drove near me, but then pulled into a nearby neighborhood to pick me up. In retrospect, he was probably trying to get me to cancel the ride for the fee. After the ride, he claimed I damaged in internals of his door(?). They slapped me with a $100 charge and refused to dispute it. It took a lot of escalation with Lyft in order to get the $100 charge refunded. The experience has definitely made me more weary of using rideshare services.

This is totally unsurprising given an uber driver in manhattan told me he does a clean up charge at the end of every shift, because... he basically feels like with "pool", it's victimless.

This is just fearmongering, seeing as these occurrences are pretty rare.

In fact, Uber is aware of the fee being potentially unfair / a scam so they already expect you to contest it.

The last sentence of https://help.uber.com/riders/article/i-was-charged-a-cleanin... reads

"If you were charged a cleaning fee you feel is inaccurate or unfair, please let us know here."

The title of this article is very sensationalized. What does the author want? Removing the driver's ability to charge for cleanup fees is not reasonable. Sounds like letting them charge but allowing the rider to contest it is the right compromise. Perhaps asking drivers to upload a photo evidence of the incident would be a nice extra, but it's not like we're going to stop using ridesharing apps because this weird edge case might potentially hypothetically happen to us one day

I guess it's not surprising that at some point less ethical drivers would start to do this. (And of course the rideshare services very poor rates for their drivers probably pushes more people to behave unethically to make working for Uber, Lyft, etc. more economically sustainable for them).

I guess the logical response is for Uber & Lyft to lean towards believing the customer in these situations, not the driver. Which is going to understandably anger a bunch of drivers who are left holding the bag when passengers legitimately make a mess of their vehicles. And the logical response to that is for all these drivers to get cameras in their cars filming the interiors so they can prove it. I guess outward facing dash cams are already pretty common in areas where accident fraud is common, so maybe that's (unfortunately) the likely end-state here.

I've made it a point to ask my drivers (usually Lyft) in every ride, "How's driving going?" and "Been driving for long?"

As a result, I've heard drivers lament about actual vomit and other weird problems. From my (much) experience as a rider, all of the vomit stories have been very legit sounding. (Of course, if there were fraud they probably wouldn't mention it)

Surprisingly, one of the things mentioned most often is passengers still trying to drink in the car. Like they will open new containers discreetly or conspicuously, at times even against warnings from the driver.

In one story, they charged the passenger for cleaning not because they threw up, but instead because the opened beer cases they brought in to the car had leaking beer cans so now the whole car smells like beer.

I always wanted to drive a Honda Element for Uber... one with hydraulics... pick up people from the bars, and “expedite” their vomiting. The element is designed to be hosed out, so 5 min of cleaning, and you’re back on the road.

Had more trouble with their food delivery service where the driver marks the food as delivered when its not.