UberEats took unauthorized amount (and not willing to pay it back)
twitter.com
twitter.com
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rj0a19/made_...
A similar thing happened to me. I still have an email that says "your order was cancelled but we'll refund you in 3 weeks". Three weeks later I still had no refund but since so much time had passed, their support refused to consider my complaint. After trying everything I could think of I eventually reversed the charge with my bank which took another 4 weeks or so. Then shortly after that I tried to book a taxi through Uber (not UberEats) and was unexpectedly charged the original amount for my cancelled food order. Again I had to get that amount refunded through my bank which again took weeks.
Most people will not bother to get their money back. Uber's business model is literal theft.
Every few weeks I get an email from Uber Eats with a generous-looking promotional code, to the tune of 25% off. If I line up an order on the website and enter the promotional code, no discount appears on the order. If I refresh the page and re-enter the code, it tells me That code has already been used.
This has happened to me 3 times now, if I recall correctly.
It's not as if this can be blamed on my using a peculiar browser. Last time this happened I was using Edge, with no plugins or funky configuration changes.
This has repeated at least six times. I'm just morbidly curious how long this cycle will go.
Submitted a request for a quote from a moving company, and included the specific date of move in the request. They called me, gave me a quote, but I opted to go with someone else. Moving date came and went, we got settled in, and about a week later the emails came in.
I would get one email per day informing me that they hadn't heard from me yet and needed to hear from me ASAP if I was still interested. They proceeded to include a comment that said they would not stop emailing me until they heard from me. Each email also appeared to be hand-typed by this person every day.
I wrote an email asking them if they even bothered to notice that my move date had come and gone, but stopped myself because, like you, I was morbidly curious. It took them three months of ignoring their, "We won't stop until you call us," emails for them to finally stop.
I realize that maybe the person was forced to do it by their boss, and people hate being ghosted, but it was so far out of my idea of social norms that I didn't want to talk to them even more.
If they're not taking the hint after 10 calls with no response, what are they thinking? How far will it escalate?
If I was just busy for a few days and wasn't ghosting them, what do they think they've accomplished?
The salesman was ~half my age, and I knew someone ~twice my age who had bought and serviced a car there and simply said they had no such experience, like I had.
I guess that older people do feel it's more of a faux pas to not return a call. But it's never been normal to go nuclear even so.
I have wondered if the reason for weird stuff at car dealers is simply that, with a commission-based position, you can basically let anybody who thinks they can do it try, and some of them are going to be weird overconfident people.
But I also figure that as a rule, really weird "customer service" is probably management coercion for some stupid reason.
Possibly forever. This is the Bed, Bath, and Beyond advertising model.
Flooding your in/mail-box with coupons is a way of keeping the brand fresh in your mind. Considering the worthlessness of the coupons, and the small number of people who use them, it's more than worth the expense.
Are there a bunch of restrictions? $20 off sure sounds pretty good.
At first I figured it was a bug, after a couple more rounds I wondered if they counted on me deciding “whatever I’m hungry”.
Had similar issues with coupon codes from other non food services too…
How on earth did that make it all the way into the app.
You weren't kidding. Fraud doesn't get more blatant than this
Besides they're as likely to tell the developers to code it up so they could do this in theory and then turn it on themselves.
Nobody's absolving the managers or owners from their part in this issue. The point is that the guy with the mortgage decided that an extra room in his house or a bigger backyard is worth stealing from others. This isn't some ethically grey area, its outright theft that the engineer enabled.
> Besides they're as likely to tell the developers to code it up so they could do this in theory and then turn it on themselves.
I've never worked at Uber or any other big corp so I can't speak to how they do things there. This seems quite probable, but still doesn't completely absolve the engineer from responsibility. All it does is reduce their share of blame.
Whether consciously or not, scapegoating their minions does exactly that.
This is a pervasive feature of American culture where the most guilty parties with the most power who have the least defensible motives use FUD to spread the blame around and it actually works. People buy this shit and even internalize it - something this thread is a living testament to.
This is the same shit that happened when the CEO of Boeing tried to blame the dead pilots and subsequently tried to throw his engineers under the bus and each time where there was even a shade of doubt a ready cohort of people stood ready to defend the self serving FUD he pumped out.
>I've never worked at Uber or any other big corp so I can't speak to how they do things there.
Only at small companies have I ever been asked to build $evilfeature. At big companies I get asked to build $featurethatcouldbeabused. The bigger the impact and the more morally wrong it is the more feature indirection there will be.
Either way it's good to know that when somebody with the power to deprive me of my sole income asks me to build a kitchen knife they intend to stab someone with there's a willing crowd on hacker news ready to claim that they dont get to hog all of the blame because I technically could have refused to make that kitchen knife and joined the unemployment queue.
Normally I'd tend to believe it was a mistake, but after several reports and their lax attitude to them it's clear it works as intended, at least for now.
I guess this is your choice but I find it unethical. If you're a good engineer at Uber chances are 100% you can get a job at any other high-paying organization, so why choose to participate in this scheme?
As for the core of your point, frankly, half of the Silicon Valley would be jobless. Not just Uber programmers who already proved who they are by developing Greyball. The whole business of Facebook and Google is centered around tracking people. Amazon will happily accept fake reviews and products as long as customers pay they're happy. Netflix officially says they're competing with the time their customers use for sleeping. Apple will do everything to make their products environment unfriendly, unupgradeable, with ton of additional accessories produced only to increase their profit. So really, I understand your idealism, but the ship has already sailed and you can call yourself lucky if you can work on a product and for a company that are 100% ethical.
However, in this case, things are quite black and white. Someone pays money for food, they don't get any and then you keep the money anyway. Calling it anything other than theft is being delusional. If they did partial refunds or they only gave uber eats credit instead of money then this case would be in the same bucket as the ones you mentioned in your comment.
Thankfully my company isn’t scum of the earth, but it’s easy to see how multiple people assumed the features were being used for good intention, and a non-engineer used it to make a few extra bucks.
Is there some limitation to this approach that I'm not aware of?
They essentially ghosted me support wise so I did a chargeback. They then banned me from buying games. It took > 100 days to resolve it. Never buy hardware from oculus/facebook directly.
In an ideal world.
Your movies/books should be local. Your apps still exist on your local android phone.
Amazon seems to have customer service same as Apple but Google and Uber? Those places laugh at you when you need support..
This makes sense, as the feedback loop from how you feel about their product to how much revenue they make is immediate, unlike Google. If Uber were to piss me off enough, I wouldn't think twice about just opening Lyft every time I needed a car instead of Uber. I'm not very price-sensitive, but even my price-sensitive friends find it too much of a burden to check both options every time they call a car. This means we're all locked into an equilibrium where we spend large amounts of money with a single company, but can shift into a different equilibrium for very minor reasons. Hell, I think the last time I switched was because I got tired of all the little usability papercuts the Lyft app is filled with.
Interesting, this makes total sense
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rj0a19/made_...
> Bill's Kitchen couldn't complete your order and has to cancel. We're sorry we couldn't complete your order this time but thanks for continuing to support restaurants.
> You'll still be charged
Commenters are saying this is flat-out illegal and OP should contact their bank.
They said no such vulnerability existed. I sent them video. They said I must have been doctoring the video because they couldn't reproduce it. They then banned me.
This was in 2015.
They were then sued because the vulnerability apparently identified someone's affair[0].
I sent my email exchange with Uber to the attorney who sued Uber, letting them know that they were aware of the bug two years prior. You know, because no good deed goes unpunished.
I get by just fine on Lyft these days.
---
However, I read that many drivers work for both anyway, and over time, on the infrequent occasions I needed a ride, I realized only one thing really mattered to me.
That is, that a driver keeps at least one hand on the wheel at all times while driving. That's my definition of professionalism.
I just feel like I have better odds of that with Uber, maybe they simply have more drivers these days.
That's the beauty of having a uniform, consolidated experience, whether or not you are in San Francisco, Zurich, or Bangkok.
I opened a support ticket but GrubHub kicked me out of the support chat claiming my issue had been solved, and I couldn't open a new one.
I meant to file a charge-back but never got around to it.
I'm not normally the kind of person to constantly complain about service or ask for refunds, but there was a period of time where their service was terrible. 90-120 minutes to get food, wrong food, spills, so on and so forth.
My first complaint, they gave me credit for the full order. Used that on a second order, which I ended up canceling after 2 hours with no delivery, so they reapplied the credit. The next order was the same thing - 2 hours, no food. So I tried calling them and just asking them to give me my money back instead, and said that I no longer wanted to use their service.
They refused, said I would only be offered credit, but they still closed my account and I get an error any time I try and log in. They just up and kept my ~$60.
It's the worst of all worlds. We entered a Faustian bargain to allow these corporations to usher in techno-libertarian dystopia, but instead of the Hiro Protagonist we were promised, we get an angry Walter White.
† Horizontally, not vertically, though really, who's counting?
But it was relatively easy to prevent problems with this. When the user clicked the button to place the order, we sent along the expected order total, the expected item IDs to purchase, the expected tax, etc. In the backend, one of the last validation step before the order was finalized was just to compare the final order details against those expected values. If there were any differences, the order was rejected with an error message to try again. There were then monitors on these types of errors which would go off if there was a higher-than-normal frequency of these sorts of errors, so we could track down any bugs causing price discrepancies.
I'm kind of surprised that UberEats doesn't seem to have a similar validation step.
I don't see any reason from the post to believe this kind of race condition is what happened here.
Uber's CS says the promotional code used was not valid for this restaurant, but presumably the app accepted it anyway. That's also likely a validation error, but of a different class.
> …but presumably the app accepted it anyway…
Not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure things like this would constitute a contract. Of course, whether there’s squirrelly language in the Terms of Service is another question…
EDIT: formatting
That's what OP was saying.
They constantly try to tempt us back with 40% promos, but we have sworn off ever using them again.
Last time we used them, every driver allocated to pick up the order abandoned the delivery when they got to the restaurant. I assume something was going wrong at the restaurant. This happened maybe 10-15 times, to the point that we were joking that the restaurant was murdering the drivers. The app didn't offer any ability to contact customer service, as it only seemed to unlock customer service after the order is actually delivered. None of the phone numbers online would get through to a human. We didn't want to order from elsewhere in case that order ended up getting delivered. It took 5hrs (!) before the app auto-cancelled the order.
Additional to that, the drivers rarely find my house, always turn up in different vehicles to what is claimed on the app and quite frequently a different person entirely. The order time is always longer than what it claims (much like Uber itself). The app is terribly unstable and frequency crashes, displays errors or loses my basket.
Deliveroo are so much better it's not even funny.
Except the app gave no errors or notices about this, no "sorry, we can't find a driver right now, hang on..." prompt. Nor did it update the ETA for the order. It just happily kept pushing the ETA back, 5 minutes at a time, with no notice of any sort.
After about an hour I contacted the restaurant - I'm a regular there and they were puzzled - the order had been ready for quite some time and no one had shown up to pick it up. The Uber app on their end showed no errors or notifications to indicate something was wrong. So I contacted UberEats CS, where the agent revealed the "can't find a driver" part of the story, and then announced that there was nothing to be done about it.
That part really pissed me off - Uber charges surge pricing to customers to incentivize more drivers, but when push comes to shove on a poor customer experience is unwilling to increase the payout for a delivery to expedite it? Given the absolutely usurious rates Uber charges restaurants to use their service they weren't even willing to sacrifice a small part of their margin to try and get a stuck order moving?
The craziest part of this is how apologetic the restaurant was for something that absolutely had nothing to do with them. It sounds like UberEats fucks up regularly and customers take it out on the restaurants - meanwhile UberEats runs away to the bank with their absurd per-ticket commissions for failing to fulfill their role.
Oh wait, no, they're not running away to the bank at all. Somehow despite running a truly shitty service and charging usurious fees to restaurants they are still losing money hand over fist.
I will say - I have misgivings generally about the gig economy, but I now exclusively use DoorDash. I've had a couple of screwups with them but they have always responded promptly in a no-bullshit way.
I now check to see if the restaurant is on ChowNow, which is a subscription on the restaurant's end and is a bit more fair as far as I can tell. Usually it's quite a bit cheaper to order through them and my understanding is the restaurant is getting more of the money. Of course hilariously then the orders are "fulfilled with DoorDash".
As a former Uber driver, I can tell you that in the market where I drove, this happened quite a lot. The reason is that drivers who got kicked out of Uber would then rent other people's Uber accounts, or have other people sign up for them.
Another thing I learned is that when someone is such a terrible taxi driver that they actually somehow manage to lose their hack license (I know, hard to imagine someone that bad), they just sign up with Uber. You learn this when you're hanging out at the airport staging area at slow times. There were dozens and dozens and dozens of drivers who were people that the local government wouldn't allow to drive taxis anymore.
Not sure if the UK has a similar ministry you could appeal to? Though one would consider the risk of being banned from Uber Eats over $4.
I guess chargebacks are less of a thing in the UK?
Fortunately I don't mind playing along and I'm pretty sure having this deliberately crazy process (instead of an online form) is a much bigger pain for my credit card provider (who are hoping for churn and people abandoning the process) than myself. Well, not me. It's not the £4, it's the principal.
This isn’t a complex calculus. Don’t do business with companies that steal from you, especially when they get upset that you took your money back.
Lyft in my experience has been pretty happy to give me my money back whenever I’ve had a problem. That’s the problem the OP ran into: Uber Eats didn’t just “mischarge” him, they refused to remedy the situation claiming impotence on their part. That’s what turns it from a “mischarge” into theft, and something a chargeback is both justified for and the correct remedy to resolve the situation.
My friends and I played outside in the front lawn of a house in "Mid-City" district of New Orleans and called taxi cabs all day as an experiment. Every 30 minutes we'd call another taxi to come pick us up. Not one taxi arrived all day. All of them claimed they came, honked in the driveway, but no one came out. Again -- we were outside the whole day, with full view of the street and driveway.
Also, a month earlier, the only taxi driver who once did drop me off there tried to illegally charge double until I called the police, who arrived after he left.
Uber/Lyft we had no trouble with at all!
If I were in the OP's position I'd report Uber to trading standards, threaten to take them to court, and quite possibly follow through with it, representing myself. They're an odious company and have quite clearly just nicked money here with no recompense.
That way you have an atomic transfer. I get food, you get money.
It could easily work with card, just pay on arrival and show the driver the payment confirmation.
But that would mean Uber taking a small risk of fraud (e.g. people ordering food they didn't want before their account gets banned).
So it won't happen unless people force it. It's the sort of thing that makes me wish that everyone else just, well, had a backbone. There are so many minor examples of bad systems all over the place that continue to exist because most people just put up with bad practice.
Not an advert, but I predominantly use Just Eat in the UK for this reason, or just go directly to restaurants. Their fees are lower too.
You can literally stand at the door, check that the food is there, done.
The worst case is that the restaurant scams you and it's not good food. This happens far far less than the middleman scams or pseudo-scams like oversubscribing delivery drivers so that everything is cold or late.
If you are really too young to remember this, you can watch “Home Alone” to see some examples of how this worked.
I'm old enough to remember when you could pump gas before paying, and there was actually at least one place that had full service in town (I've never lived in NJ or OR).
Is this a joke? Come to mine and we'll get an Indian in? lol.
I'm in the US, though, so I was interested if it was a thing in the US.
Oh no you don't.
I got burned at a food truck that only took cash. I gave them money, they produce the food a minute later and say I haven't paid. I have no receipt and it's too busy for witnesses.
How many places do you pay cash and they don't give receipts? Don't you think there is a positive correlation? Why might that be? Who does it benefit?
These big companies power themselves by automation, losing sight of the fact that they should be designed to serve humans, not harvest nickel and dimes off of them. It's so easy for them to profit off of massive scale but they can't find any port of the budget to cover their own programming errors and bugs (as rarely as they do occur)??? It's easy to prosecute companies on egregious scams, but these small programming errors that probably affect a non-trivial amount of customers in small ways probably add up to big scams in scale but fly under the radar.
I feel a little bad about this, but not bad enough to change my behavior.
Either way, just lay these transgressions on the heaping pile of Uber's toxic business practices. Stealing self driving secrets from Google, maliciously targeting politicians and police, and now just petty theft.
I hadn’t heard anything like this. Can you provide details?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyball
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/uber-secr...
Delivery Hero controls everything, and you can tell. Nonexisting support, double charges if you happen to break their frontend (no nonces here), addresses, phone numbers and emails leaking to spammers without any consequences or even acknowledgement. (I only know this because I use unique data)
Please consider cutting these services out of your transactions, or at least the ones that are too big to care about consumers or providers having a good experience.
> [Tick] no response needed!
I think companies really shoot themselves in the foot with responses like this. Surely it’s worth 4 bucks to avoid the potential PR shitstorm.
It is like saying that people outraged by FB will change anything. What are you going to do? Move to TikTok?
When they do the mistake, understandably they'd rather keep the money too :)
Does UberEats pay a minimum for the delivery to the delivery person and the tip is addtional? If so, whose end does it come out of?
Are the delivery services trying to make it up in volume?
[1] https ://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/if-uber-eats-isnt-profitable-now-when-can-it-be.html
Many, many people made this exact case during the heyday of gig economy companies. Many a VCs and investors (including those who run this illustrious site) mocked this criticism as that of know-nothing haters who simply could not understand the brilliance of the minds behind these operations.
The problem is that tech support are useless automatons and there is no way to really escalate to those that can see it clearly should be fixed other than shouting on Twitter. Very frustrating when there’s no avenue for real review and redress other than chargebacks.
[1] https://twitter.com/paulgb/status/1449779457200300033?s=21
Last week I found out they never did delete my account. And they will not until I pay the balance.
Judging by the screenshots, this could be the case so I will hold my judgement.
Edit: Just wanted to make this clearer, a way to reproduce this would be:
Take screenshot of code applied.
Place order.
App tells you the code didn't apply and sends you back to the order screen with the full price displayed.
Place order.
Take screenshot of receipt.
Boom UberEats scammed me!
Not necessarily saying that OP is lying but I am too cynical.
I can't wait for this disgusting industry to be more regulated.
The main downsides are that restaurant websites can't always be trusted for secure payments, and there are fewer options now that UE had taken over deliveries.
Contact Google or Apple and tell them their App is fraudulent.
Contact the police about the theft, non emergency line.
Charge back from your bank.
File a complaint with the town chamber of commerce.
Contact your state's attorney general office.
Contact your town's newspaper and tv.
Remember that pounds are not US currency and the advice doesn't apply.
I could see customer service drop as alternatives fall away.