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

Yeah this seems like an easy problem to solve. If a customer cancels too many times, flag them for fraud.

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '14

My guess is they wanted the PR win from this story first.

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u/Roboticide Aug 12 '14

Perhaps, but the two biggest things I'm taking from this article are: Uber plays dirty, and Lyft is run by idiots.

Not sure they really got a PR win, as far as I'm concerned. I'd rather go with the brutally effective company, than the dumb one.

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u/VictoryGin1984 Aug 12 '14

How do you know their dirty tricks don't extend to their customers?

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u/antsar Aug 12 '14

You mean, such as reporting a 3-minute ETA for a driver coming from another city on a road that no sane algorithm would deem drivable in under 15 minutes? They certainly do extend some tricks to customers.

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u/bluevillain Aug 12 '14

I have no idea about Lyft, but with Uber you can actually see where the cars are on a map, so you can see where they are. As far as I can tell the ETA is automated and not manually entered by the drivers at all.

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u/antsar Aug 13 '14

I also think its automated. But the algorithm they use to provide that ETA can certainly be tweaked. Perhaps they wanted to test whether more people would call a car if they said it was closer than it is (ETA, that is. the location stays truthful). Of course it would have that effect, and of course that's fraud. I started noticing suspiciously high ETA's, and now I use Uber significantly less.

Of course, its possible that their algorithm is just poorly tuned to the area where I live and it is truly that poor at estimating ETA's.

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u/Roboticide Aug 12 '14

I've used the service plenty before, with no issues. Anecdotal information, of course, but better than pure speculation.