"This worked because Uber Eats provides couriers with prepaid cards they can use to purchase up to $700 to complete customers' orders."
$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.