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Comment by silverbax88 | Hacker News Reader

When this story came out a couple of months ago, I didn't really understand how this would go undetected for any amount of extended time. One driver keeps having hundreds of dollars in cancelled orders and there's no tracking of it?

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Every single driver at the airport repeatedly cancels over and over if the fare is less than 100$ - clearly there is no tracking going on of anything at Uber.

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.

Why don’t you just use American Express? If I have a merchant dispute and they don’t fix it after 1-2 emails. I just charge it back by calling AMEX. It works fantastically well.

Wouldn’t a chargeback result in being banned from Uber?

More than likely, yes. Chargebacks work way better for goods than it does for services. The online store you bought goods from might ban you if you initiate a chargeback, but usually with stores it's not that big of a deal, there's an alternative store to go to anyway.

Because I will get banned for life from Uber...

Why would you want to continue doing business with a company who put you through a “massive shitfight” over money owed to you? I would charge back and never do business with them again.

I’ve had enough deliveries where the person making the drop off isn’t the person on the app (wrong gender often) to think there’s a pretty heavy trade or even loaning of accounts enough so that these guys may have had a large stable of courier accounts to work from.

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.

To be fair many times it is a husband/wife thing -- wife is delivering using the husband's account, for example.

Sometimes there are teams of two doing deliveries. It seems much more efficient, because the driver doesn’t have to actually park, and I also wonder if they can get more orders by having two accounts open at once.

Yeah, I've come across this plenty of times. When it is food delivery I don't really care, but sometimes a totally different car than shown on the app will pull up to give you a ride and expect you to get in. No thanks, that's a cancellation from me.

It’s probably on some dashboard somewhere that nobody looks at

Sometimes the companies notice the scams but let them continue until the amount gets big enough for the authorities to take them seriously. Similar to how stores will let repeat shoplifters keep stealing until the total amount has crossed the threshold for the state to prosecute them, and only then report it.

large companies have departments. communication between departments about discrepancies can be slow, allowing fraud to fly under the radar for quite some time.

This is Uber we're talking about.

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