My wife is banned for life from Uber because after she was overcharged by a driver by $80 (for a five minute ride), and after Uber denied her dispute of the fraudulent charge, she flagged the fraudulent charge with the credit card company and got refunded via that route. I don't think a human was in the loop for any step of this process on Uber's end.
For perspective, she had a similar sleazy taxi driver years ago, who she complained about to the taxi company. He was fired immediately and the taxi company offered to help my wife with going to the police if she wanted to (and offered the in-car video).
Thankfully we still have taxis locally, but the drivers have told me their numbers have dropped and Uber is winning.
I think location matters lots, the last city I lived in I avoided taxis at all costs because I found them to be more like you're saying... aggressive, clueless, dirty, etc.
> she had a similar sleazy taxi driver years ago, who she complained about to the taxi company. He was fired immediately
This actually scares me more than Uber banning your wife. I'm not saying you or your wife lied, but it's sad how just a complaint by a woman can ruin any man's life. (I'm assuming your wife didn't have any evidence and the taxi company just fired the driver due to her complaint.)
It's past time to nerf these yahoos. Civilize them. Impose tort, fair and impartial judiciary, right to appeal, property rights, and accountability & transparency.
There need to be serious consequences for this "the computer made a mistake" bullshit.
https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...
Right now, it's "only" a frustration in most cases but what happens when Amazon bans you while PillPack is how you receive your meds?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/terraria-developer-c...
Really all you need is a mediocre Plan A: don't run afoul of the providers' rules. It's not hard. AWS hosts a lot of content that's even more offensive than Parler, the thing that got Parler in trouble was they weren't able or willing to act on Amazon's demand that they promptly remove content that encouraged or incited violence. So if you're running a platform that hosts content like that, or you're breaking the law or generally breaking the pretty straightforward rules, yeah, have a Plan B, C and D ready to go at a moment's notice. Most of us aren't running things that cater to people who are into political violence or other liability-causing activities so it's not a thing we need to spend a lot of time and money planning for.
Only exception to this rule would be GCP or any other company that's widely known for atrocious service and capricious, random bans.
The merchant is stuck with more than the tab. There's also a chargeback fee, which can range from around $15 to several times that depending on who they use for payment processing.
> Doing a chargeback means the relationship between consumer and merchant is ineffective that they can't resolve their differences normally.
Sometimes it means that the customer didn't even try to resolve the dispute. At one place I worked we always gave a refund when one was requested, with no hassle. Some customers, though, would not ask. They would go straight to chargeback.
I think that because some companies make it a major hassle to get them to issue a refund, some consumers try to do a chargeback first and only call the merchant if the bank requires them to try to settle the issue directly first.
I was always under the impression that if consumers did this sort of thing too often it would end up hurting them because the CC company would start to flag their account.
Sort of an algorithmic version of "If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole."
Source - happened to me. Ended up relationship with both the merchant and credit card company. And have $2k less in my wallet.
Often they will side with the consumer and will refund the charges through their various policies, but they also investigate the case and will let the payment go through if there's no actual problem found. There are plenty of cases where consumers didn't even contact the merchant at all and yet still chargeback.
That is actually not true. The credit card company must follow established guidelines and pragmatically look at the available information/user agreement/contract and decide on whether there was a breach of contract. They can not blindly stick the bill to the business.
That's not even remotely true. The merchant absolutely has the ability to dispute chargebacks.
Luck has nothing to do with it. That’s bad planning. Really bad.
"Thanks for bringing this to our attention, @TheSofaaa . We believe this is due to a technical bug, which we are actively investigating. We apologize to you and any other drivers who may be impacted, all of whom will be fully refunded."
It's kind of sad that these days the only way to get real support is to make noise on Twitter. And probably 95% of the time posts don't get that initial snowball to make noise.
I don’t have Twitter, but I have complained to companies via Facebook (which at this point I don’t notably use either, but still have an account) private messages, and have had my problem fixed efficiently after complete failure via multiple other methods of contact. (Those companies being Vodacom South Africa who kept sending me some customer’s invoices, and Uber Eats, which made a complete mess of an order in multiple ways.)
The acquaintance didn't care to do anything about it so I sent e-mails to their property management the next day, and got no response. I then shamed the property management co on their Facebook page in comments with photos of the void and that got a prompt response.
... while illegally operating at a loss without a permit to drive the competition out of the space.
No reason a taxi service couldn't offer the same experience, but you see a lot of scenarios where that's not an option.
Before Covid, I'd go to the head office in the suburbs of Chicago twice a year. The first few times, I took a taxi from the stand and watched powerlessly as the meter ticked up and up, not knowing when it would stop. With Lyft, I could at least see if it would be $25 or 65 before I agreed to summon the vehicle.
In other news, I wish Metra would go straight to and from O'hare.
My card was stolen after taking a ride so I reported it. This prevented a ride charge from going through. Uber locked my account, which then prevented me from paying.
Uber support's assistance was Kafkaesque.
They advised that I could reactivate my account by logging in and paying the balance. I told them I couldn't. Around and around we went.
So I just use Lyft now.
Sometimes they get hailed as a magic wand on consumer-advocate sites, but if you issue a chargeback with your bank, you should be prepared to completely sever relations with the vendor.
How's that? Drivers don't set the fare, Uber does.
Drivers don't charge riders - Uber does.
> Using sensors and GPS data, RideCheck can help detect if a trip goes unusually off-course or a possible crash has occurred. If the app notices such events, we’ll check in on you and offer resources to get help.
Auto-ending rides doesn't even make sense. If the final destination pin happens to be in the middle of a highway off ramp (due to a map error) would you want the app to "autoend" the ride on the offramp (and kick the passenger out on the shoulder), or let the driver do the sensible thing, get off the ramp and pull over to a safer location to let the person off?
This case happens especially often at airports, where the passenger drop off area can literally be represented on the maps as "side of the highway" but in fact, there are traffic loops that the driver needs to navigate in order to comply with traffic rules and routing at airports.
How did this "attack" work, did the driver override the destination somehow?