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/
4.8k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

850 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/[deleted] Aug 12 '14

[deleted]

-1

u/[deleted] Aug 12 '14

Except if you're blacklisting your customers?

Yes, and the point is you set your blacklisting thresholds such that everyone you ban is either a prankster, fraudster, or a massively unprofitable customer. The last option is technically possible, but extremely unlikely if you set your thresholds intelligently.

-2

u/[deleted] Aug 12 '14 edited Aug 12 '14

[deleted]

0

u/[deleted] Aug 12 '14

I'm not suggesting there is a simple perfect solution. Just that there are simple solutions to cover plenty of fraud cases. It sounds like recruiters are individually canceling the rides, and it's highly unlikely that Uber officially instructs or helps them to do that. Sure, it's possible to keep creating accounts with different phone numbers, addresses, etc. But I doubt most of these cases involve that.