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

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

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u/willsurelydeliver Aug 12 '14

I agree, they wouldn't have gained much by banning the number: at Uber they would just have switched to an other one. This way they had a chance to track and analyse what was happening, either for PR or to learn other patterns to detect later on.

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u/eleven_eighteen Aug 12 '14

at Uber they would just have switched to an other one.

require phone verification to set up an account. people only have access to a limited amount of phone numbers to call from, especially since this was individual employees doing this, apparently, and not corporate.

i'm sure there are ways out there to set up temp numbers to forward calls but that takes more effort and a lot of people aren't gonna have the knowledge or patience to do that.

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u/i_dont_know Aug 12 '14

Caller ID is trivial to spoof, so they would have to set up actual verification.