This seems like a "non-story". Uber has a feature (charge customer a fee for vomiting in their car) that some drivers have abused, and Uber refunded the customers that were wrongfully charged. Seems like a pretty cut and dry situation that they are trying to make a bigger deal than it is.
EDIT: The original Miami Herald article people have now linked def paints a bit of a different picture.
I don't know, I guess I just don't see it as a real story when so little customers are reporting it as a problem. Esp when all the customers referenced in the story itself didn't even have to do a chargeback. Yeah, it was a hassle with some emails back and forth, but Uber eventually took care of them all (at least the ones referenced in the article). I've personally never had a problem at all disputing a charge from Uber (I use the service every day for work).
There are people that use Uber with debit cards, and who don't have a lot of money hanging around in their accounts. An $80-$150 charge (that takes time to ever get refunded) is a big deal for those people.
I understand what you're saying, but the fact is that, at least the customers in the article, all did eventually get a refund. Which makes it a "non-story" to me, personally. This could happen with any company. Company X accidentally charges you more, you dispute it, and you get your money back. It sucks, yeah, but it's not a big enough Uber specific problem to warrant a story like this trying to make it a bigger deal than it is.
That's only because you're ignoring all the other comments which point out that there are people who didn't get refunds, and that there were others who had to go back and forth with Uber and fight for these refunds.
Sorry, all the Miami Herald original article links came after I made these comments. I was going off the info mentioned in the Gizmodo article. The original article def paints a bit of a different picture.
It's just surprising to me the article didn't reference any customers in your case that HAVEN'T been refunded. All the ones they mention in the article eventually got their refund. It doesn't really make it look like that big of a deal in the article. Would help their argument if they included people haven't been able to get a refund, like yourself.
The Miami Herald article where I think this story broke suggests it's that not every incident gets resolved:
> Despite several email exchanges, Uber never agreed to reimburse her the extra money. But she disputed the charge with her credit card company and got back her $98. Uber then canceled her account.
Check out this article [1] and its accompanying HN post. It references cases where chargebacks were the only option, and one particular story where a rider had two rides back to back commit vomit fraud.
> Despite several email exchanges, Uber never agreed to reimburse her the extra money. But she disputed the charge with her credit card company and got back her $98. Uber then canceled her account.
From the original article this one is referencing -
> “I immediately contacted Uber through the app. I told them that I was alone, sober, that I was not carrying any drinks and that it was impossible for me to have caused that damage,” she said. “But every new email from Uber came from a different representative and always favored the driver.”
> Despite several email exchanges, Uber never agreed to reimburse her the extra money. But she disputed the charge with her credit card company and got back her $98. Uber then canceled her account.
Is it too unreasonable of an idea for Uber to eventually force in-car CCTV (i.e. a reversed dash cam) for all rides in progress?
Seems like it would solve a lot of the he said / she said arguments discussed in the articles, at a relatively low cost footprint. I guess economically, the cost of 'fraud' would have to outweigh the cost of dash cams.
The driver should be required to report an incident like vomiting while the ride is still in progress. Then the passenger should get a notification on the app with the ability to contest the accusation and submit a picture of the clean seat right from the app to prove their story.
Or what happened to me, where I was in a vegas cab (before Uber existed), but there was some confusion (perhaps with the next passenger?) and I was charged ~$200. Disputing it, especially ~10 years ago was a nightmare. Uber has a lot of issues, but I do not miss cabs.
I mean you say that now, but cab drivers can be pretty forceful. Some friends of mine had a dispute with cab driver, he took off with some still in the car, running red lights so they couldn't get out, and eventually stopped somewhere where they had other cab drivers meet him to get my friends to pay more money.
You might try to walk away, and end up with a cab driver chasing you down.
It's not just vomit fraud. I hired an Uber Black to pick up my mother-in-law once and got charged $60 in "damages" from the driver claiming she damaged the interior... the woman is not even 90 pounds and had recently recovered from hip replacement surgery. My wife asked her about it and she was shocked... said the ride was very smooth and the driver was friendly. She's not the sort of person to make anything like that up or omit it out of embarrassment.
We gave a driver a 3-star rating for being a particularly bad driver (driving aggressively, cursing at other drivers etc).
Later that day, my girlfriend (whose account we had used for the ride) got a warning/strike on her Uber account because a driver had reported her for "making racist remarks in his vehicle and making his driving experience uncomfortable".
For the record we had barely spoken a word in the car during the ride, as we were both quite tired. Our driver spoke more than we did and it was mostly obscene complaints about other drivers and cars on the road.
We concluded it had to be the same driver, as we hadn't taken another Uber in a few days, so it was basically retaliation.
The email said that if enough of these reports are received she would be removed from the platform and her account would be shut down. There didn't seem to be any recourse or appeals process noted in the email..
So I wonder if this is a sneaky way for drivers to punish passengers for bad ratings..
How do you prove/disprove this kind of accusation?
When you rate you can indicate why you're giving the rating, but yeah that is what the rating is for. This guy wasn't threatening or aggressive towards us in any way, he was just an unpleasant and bad driver.
So we did what we thought we should: we gave him a rating that reflected our experience.
I did suggest that she complain about the driver's complaint since that was the real problem.. I'm not sure if she ultimately did though, as I left it up to her to decide what to do since it's her Uber account. :)
I know for tips, specifically, the Uber driver doesn't know how much they got from any given person. It just gets pooled up and they see an aggregate. Last time I asked a friend who drove for Uber, the same thing basically applied for ratings. Like a driver doesn't know what you rate them, just their aggregate rating overall, and even then, I don't know how freq it would update for them to be able to make a correlation that the person they just dropped off made an impact on their rating.
With that said, it still sucks this happened to your girlfriend. My guess is that he reported that on the way the ride went (in general), and not based on her giving him a bad rating because I don't think he would have that information. I could be wrong, though. Would love to hear if anyone who drives for Uber could back that up or not about the transparency of ratings per ride.
> How do you prove/disprove this kind of accusation?
By having one's rides on Twitch /s
On a more serious note, if police body cams reduce misconduct, perhaps Uber requesting that rides are recorded would have the same effect. That said, it's just an idea, were this kind of behavior to become rampant. Personally, I'm always for less surveillance.
Many drivers I ride with already have dashcams recording both inside and outside the car. I could see Uber subsidizing them on the condition they get access to the video.
Just thinking out loud: was this maybe an UberPool ride, and the other passenger(s) submitted a complaint and mistakenly selected "other passenger" rather than "driver" in whatever menu they have?
Honestly, we didn't really react to him at all, he seemed to be in his own world (mostly focused on getting mad at other cars).. So I don't think we would have signalled that.
Ironically, my girlfriend is a visible minority too, so she was extra-incensed about the racism complaint.
Whatever you think of GDPR in total, this is one of the advantages. If you were an EU citizen, Uber would be required to let you know what data they have on you informing their banning algorithms, and they'd be required to let you fix the inaccurate data.
> And in 2016, a Tampa area driver was reportedly booted from the platform after charging multiple customers cleanup fees for suspiciously similar looking messes.
So lazy, why not commit and actually cause yourself to vomit? Then you foil reverse image searches. You could get creative with it and swallow different food colorings and paint beautiful mosaics on your car seats.
Forcing yourself to vomit is not a good idea of course, but if you have no scruples about lying anyways, maybe you deserve a little personal damage to go along with your deceit?
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadEDIT: The original Miami Herald article people have now linked def paints a bit of a different picture.
Do you mean "so little customers are reporting it to HN" ? Or do you have some data from Uber internal support?
> Despite several email exchanges, Uber never agreed to reimburse her the extra money. But she disputed the charge with her credit card company and got back her $98. Uber then canceled her account.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article215299675.h...
[1]: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article215299675.h...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587952
EDIT: I found a way to re-open my support ticket with uber and linked them the miamiherald article - they then immediately refunded the cleaning fee.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article215299675.h...
> “I immediately contacted Uber through the app. I told them that I was alone, sober, that I was not carrying any drinks and that it was impossible for me to have caused that damage,” she said. “But every new email from Uber came from a different representative and always favored the driver.”
> Despite several email exchanges, Uber never agreed to reimburse her the extra money. But she disputed the charge with her credit card company and got back her $98. Uber then canceled her account.
That's the story.
Seems like it would solve a lot of the he said / she said arguments discussed in the articles, at a relatively low cost footprint. I guess economically, the cost of 'fraud' would have to outweigh the cost of dash cams.
Tomorrows HN article: Police subpoenas Uber for in-car CCTV video.
> Tomorrows H̶N̶ Gizmodo article:
FTFY ;)
He cannot simply steal money from my bank account and make me fight to get it back.
You might try to walk away, and end up with a cab driver chasing you down.
If this was in a foreign country with limited recourse you are of course probably boned.
We gave a driver a 3-star rating for being a particularly bad driver (driving aggressively, cursing at other drivers etc).
Later that day, my girlfriend (whose account we had used for the ride) got a warning/strike on her Uber account because a driver had reported her for "making racist remarks in his vehicle and making his driving experience uncomfortable".
For the record we had barely spoken a word in the car during the ride, as we were both quite tired. Our driver spoke more than we did and it was mostly obscene complaints about other drivers and cars on the road.
We concluded it had to be the same driver, as we hadn't taken another Uber in a few days, so it was basically retaliation.
The email said that if enough of these reports are received she would be removed from the platform and her account would be shut down. There didn't seem to be any recourse or appeals process noted in the email..
So I wonder if this is a sneaky way for drivers to punish passengers for bad ratings..
How do you prove/disprove this kind of accusation?
So we did what we thought we should: we gave him a rating that reflected our experience.
I did suggest that she complain about the driver's complaint since that was the real problem.. I'm not sure if she ultimately did though, as I left it up to her to decide what to do since it's her Uber account. :)
With that said, it still sucks this happened to your girlfriend. My guess is that he reported that on the way the ride went (in general), and not based on her giving him a bad rating because I don't think he would have that information. I could be wrong, though. Would love to hear if anyone who drives for Uber could back that up or not about the transparency of ratings per ride.
Those people are wayyy too busy to read HN.
Yeah even then, like I said we both sat quietly in the back of the car the whole way.
I can't imagine we gave him any reason to legitimately complain about us.
By having one's rides on Twitch /s
On a more serious note, if police body cams reduce misconduct, perhaps Uber requesting that rides are recorded would have the same effect. That said, it's just an idea, were this kind of behavior to become rampant. Personally, I'm always for less surveillance.
Ironically, my girlfriend is a visible minority too, so she was extra-incensed about the racism complaint.
In many countries, the previous scammy taxi drivers are now Uber drivers. I thus expect "vomit fraud" to expand unless Uber manages to control it.
> And in 2016, a Tampa area driver was reportedly booted from the platform after charging multiple customers cleanup fees for suspiciously similar looking messes.
Forcing yourself to vomit is not a good idea of course, but if you have no scruples about lying anyways, maybe you deserve a little personal damage to go along with your deceit?