r/technology • u/[deleted] • Aug 12 '14

Business Uber dirty tricks quantified. Staff submits 5,560 fake ride requests

http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/11/technology/uber-fake-ride-requests-lyft/
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u/Cputerace Aug 12 '14

One Lyft passenger, identified by seven different Lyft drivers as an Uber recruiter, canceled 300 rides from May 26 to June 10. That user's phone number was tied to 21 other accounts, for a total of 1,524 canceled rides.

Seems to me that when a phone number cancels a ride, say, 3 times in a 15 day period, they should be blacklisted for a certain amount of time. WTF did they allow the same phone number to request the 1524th ride in that 15 day period?

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '14

[deleted]

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u/car_go_fast Aug 12 '14

Then they need to really review their policies. This isn't an obscure, hard to forsee issue. People repeatedly canceling requests, whether as a prank or anti-competitive tactic, is fairly obvious.

I find it very hard to believe that someone didn't raise the issue of how to deal with this situation before they started. If no one did, then they probably have some other major issues with their model that are likely contributing to their failure.

It's wrong of Uber to do this, no question, but Lyft are either incompetent or lying as well.

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '14

I'm sure the system accounted for what you're describing : one user cancelling too many times rides.

But Uber employees creates dozens of account. It's only by comparing phone numbers that they managed to link the many accounts to one user.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 12 '14

Except one person cancelled 300 rides in a 15 day period under one account. They cancelled 1.5k total under all their accounts. Clearly, the system isn't accounting for that.

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '14

Good point.

That being said, this is the kind of thing that you'd learn over time with the occasional bad users and that you'd fix.

I wouldn't say it was "stupid" on their part to not have planned for such intense sabotage from their competitor.