Florida men scammed more than $1M out of Uber Eats
insider.com
insider.com
Does anyone have more details on the logistics of this scam?
Two men from the Fort Lauderdale, Florida area scammed Uber Eats out of more than $1 million over 19 months, local police say.
The suspects carried out the scheme — which began in January 2022 — by creating fake accounts on the Uber Eats app to act as both the customer and courier when placing grocery orders, the Broward County Sheriff's Office said in a statement. This worked because Uber Eats provides couriers with prepaid cards they can use to purchase up to $700 to complete customers' orders.
Police claim the suspects would show up as couriers for their fake grocery orders before canceling them and using the prepaid cards to purchase gift cards at the stores.
According to the sheriff's office, "On January 24, 2023, detectives conducted a surveillance operation and observed Morgan and Blackwood travel to 27 different Walgreens committing fraud that totaled a $5,013.28 loss for Uber that day. "
But that still doesn't explain why Uber's systems allowed that at all, which seems insane to me. Reading other folks comments, it seems that Uber Eats allows an order to be canceled after it has already been purchased, which to me is already crazy, but if that is indeed something that Uber intentionally allows, what do they tell Uber Eats couriers to do with the purchased items? Do they say "just throw it away"??? I would expect that Uber would require some evidence, or at least give some guidance, on what couriers should do in this situaiton. The whole thing just doesn't make any sense to me.
Some people have a problem with visiting /. You asked. I said where I got the explanation from so that other people don't have to navigate away.
> But that still doesn't explain why Uber's systems allowed that at all
What did you expect? Uber to give some sort of explanation as to how their systems can be exploited? It's surprising that the details that were released at all.
As in, Uber has to provide some allowance for the Uber Eats courier to spend while the cancellation happens.
1. Enter order for $700 of whatever 2. Got to store. 3. Cancel order 4. Buy $700 gift cards immediately
Uber sees the driver doing his job. Credit cards don’t report what’s bought, only that $700 was spent. Uber courier says “oops, I didn’t see the cancel in time”. Customer isn’t charged in this case, they cancelled.
They leave with $700 of gift cards.
Still, seems easily detectable behavior, but maybe it’s common anyway.
Recently I had one driver claim he picked me up then ended the ride immediately, claimed the full fare and it was a massive shitfight to prove to Uber that it was fraudulent.
I’d not be surprised to find a healthy gray market of people “renting” their courier account out.
Anecdotally, and perhaps unfairly, in my head I have attributed this to be couriers who may have trouble finding legal work due to residency issues. I have not had a problem with it.
There was an incident where someone did $100 million of invoice fraud against Meta and Google, until finally caught.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/business/facebook-google-...
$1,000,000 / 700 = ~1500 trips starting in January last year. 20 months = ~75 trips a month or about twice a day.
I'm not sure Uber understands what the word, "proactive" or "robust" means.
All that is to say, it's understandable if they only pounce once it gets to a certain level of badness.
You'd assume it would be one of the most common use patterns for structured fraud.
What makes you think that it's a greater than average rate?
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/03/28/how-to-avoid-invoice-the...
I’d imagine that medium sized companies without much process might be vulnerable to this, but FAANGs?? No way.
If KNOWN_PARTNER simply emails an invoice and wire instructions to an employee of one of these larger companies, there is no way in hell that’s getting paid without multiple people in the paying company simultaneously screwing up.
I’m dreaming of having an open source backend that I could run myself on my server, and that would similarly download and compress pages and then send a representation of the page that can be displayed on my iPhone without the app running any JS or anything.
Greater security, and also it would make me able to browse even in bad coverage areas where currently all that happens is I wait an eternity for things to try to load and they just time out.
Basically, I wish there was an open source backend and app that behaved like Opera Mini used to.
Web pages don't really work without in-page/dynamic javascript any longer.
On the other hand it's now cheaper than ever to just have a full-blown webkit instance in the cloud and just sync/stream the dom tree paints to the client. A bunch of products do that, I think.
Back then we had a moat because
a) Opera's Presto used so much less memory than Webkit - after having gone through so many painful memory optimization efforts, particularly with Japanese mobile browser deliveries, but also with Symbian.
b) We figured out a way of making 90% of the web javascript work be keeping "tabs" around on the server for a few minutes and then just replaying carefully selected input events and capturing the output, with some kinda clever heuristics. That combined with the low memory usage did it.
Webkit used like 10x more memory per tab/window back then, iirc. And RAM was expensive.
Not even like it's particularly niche, 80s arcade games ported to 90s machines forum dot net or something.
I still find it interesting how personal blogs could have an impact back then when they were still a relatively new idea. Google gave us preferential placement in searches, and the results for many of us was a boost in our careers and an outsized notoriety. You're not the only one who's contacted me years later about something I wrote back when. I would never have predicted that at the time.
I appreciate you commenting about it!
Uber has defied all predictions over the past 13 or so years of running out of money: there is always more $, and stock price keeps going up. It sorta defies reality--like amazon in 2015 in this regard or Tesla in 2013.
I can't shake feeling of disparity - as an ordinary Joe, you are presented with dozens of contracts for loans, mortgages, life insurance. The fine print is incomprehensible to an average person, and yet you could lose your shirt if you get it wrong and law is not on your side.
I know these are different situations, but I am getting these vubes.
I wonder if removing gift cards would stop fraudsters or what they’d move onto next.
Gift cards are just too easy to buy and use, and the people selling them aren’t paid to care what you do with them. Bitcoin ATMs might be what would replace gift cards for scams, but these are harder to use than gift cards
Gift cards are not fool proof either, anyone who touches it along its existence can extract funds, as everyone who touches it would see the card number and pin. so there is implied trust what dealing with them.
Cloned valid cards are where it’s at nowadays.
Cloned debit cards, credit cards, or gift cards? And if debit or credit, how could they be cloned if they have a chip? I assumed chips protect cards from that and skimming.
I wonder if those "discounted" cards you see are actually an artifact of money laundering where illicitly-obtained cards (from victims of phone scams?) are being laundered.
1. Customer places order for $700 worth of Avacados.
2. Uber Courier accepts the order; goes to grocery store for which Uber has issued him a $700 debit card that can only be used at that grocery store.
3. Customer canceled the order, but Uber somehow doesn’t automagically cancel the debit card, so courier buys $700 of visa gift cards.
4. Somehow Uber doesn’t monitor that issued debit card balances on canceled orders are being spent and they are bleeding $$$.. until it goes over $1MM.
Is this right?
- Place order
- Purchase gift cards
- Cancel order
Uber sees a line item for $XXX, at say Vons, and that's all they see. Generally food items are non refundable/returnable, so they have to eat the loss on canceled orders. It's actually a pretty solid scam, the issue is hiding it at scale.
Several metrics probably make them stand out:
- ratio of canceled vs fulfilled orders; frequency thereof
- ratio of average cost of canceled order to that of other drivers
- ratio of canceled orders on the consumer accounts vs population
Had they stayed small time, they probably would not have been caught
Edit: a word
From my understanding the debit cards are dynamically turned on and off and authorized only for the amount of the order. I would guess that means that they have near real time ability to see if the order has been paid for by Uber. This is pure, lunatic, shitty product management. Can you imagine if Amazon allowed you to cancel your order after it shipped?
I'd expect that having customers swallow the cost of late cancelations would likely alienate a large fraction of them; perhaps the calculus is such that the money saved doing this is actually less than the lifetime value of the average customer.
I've seen this said this a few times here in various ways, but the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero [0]. While it's feasible to eliminate most/all fraud in various arenas, it's not cost effective to do so.
Yeah that's a return and theirs entire forums dedicated to return scamming.
When the scammer, attempts to scam a scammer, who is then scammed by a another scammer; which scammer wins? Which scammer is at fault?
funny how it's some kids who made $1 million will only face state charges, and keep a decent chunk of $, but when it comes to crypto frauds, like insider trading on Coinbase or NFTs, the amount of $ is way smaller, the charges way worse, and the criminals from white collar backgrounds. It shows how the best criminals are not where or who'd you'd ordinarily expect. The lesson is stay away from crypto and keep it state instead of federal.
If these guys had been smart though, they would have just dealt with the meat man. The meat man is who people with extra food stamps sell to in order to get cash. They go buy meat from the store and he buys it at a discount. When you see videos of people shoplifting like 30lbs of meat it's not because they are about to have a BBQ they are going to sell it to the meat man. He will in turn supply all the people who set up their grills in gas stations and sell plates.
I'm sure the meat man could work it out to have all his regulars place real grocery orders and then cancel them that an Uber buyer picks up and then sells to him.