
Uber Scam in Brazil – Drivers Have ‘Challenges’ Ending Trips - prostoalex
https://loyaltylobby.com/2018/09/28/uber-scam-in-brazil-drivers-have-challenges-ending-trips/?omhide=true
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invalidusernam3
I've had something similar happen to me. I caught an uber across town and 5
minutes after being dropped off I saw the trip hadn't ended (I was trying to
order another Uber). I cancelled the trip so it ended, and contacted Uber
support. They refused to refund me anything since the additional charge
incurred while the driver was cruising around on my tab was "within the
estimated trip cost"

So basically they said I would have been charged the same amount regardless
since the cost displayed before taking a trip is an estimate, and it only
increases if it goes above the estimate. This means they're over charging for
long trips since you pay the estimated price even if the trip cost is lower
than the estimate.

I'm not sure if Uber works the same everywhere, this was in South Africa.

~~~
wut42
Happened to me in Paris. Same reply from the Uber support, but I’m pretty sure
I paid around 30€ more than needed. They kept refusing: I deleted my account.

~~~
_wmd
Similar story while in Delhi, refused to issue refunds for obvious fraud.
Closed account and opened chargeback for every journey, since they wouldn't
even help me figure out which were legitimate. I see no reason to put up with
"economies of scale"-quality support bullshit when it comes to personal
transportation, they lost a customer.

Lifetime value in this case was sharply negative

~~~
newman8r
I'm curious how those disputes ended up - did you end up getting any of them
taken off?

~~~
_wmd
The onus was on Uber to demonstrate they were legitimate, it is doubtful they
even bothered responding to the chargeback. The bank refunded every
transaction without question

~~~
chrischen
Generally it’s easy to win small transaction disputes. It’s the larger ones
where your credit card company starts to no longer care about you.

~~~
toomuchtodo
This is when you get your state's attorney general involved (and small claims
court, depending on the situation).

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krn
> Did the driver really think that I wouldn’t request Uber to fix the fare,
> however cumbersome the process might be?

I am pretty sure, that in 70-80% of the cases Uber drivers end up unchallenged
by foreigners in Brazil. Taxi scams in Rio de Janeiro are a norm even if you
take a metered taxi from a local company, as long as you don't speak
Portuguese. A few years ago I was taken on a 3x longer ride than needed, and
it didn't help that I was pointing to the driver that he is going to the
opposite direction from the route Google Maps was showing on my phone. When I
finally reached the home of my Brazilian friend, she couldn't believe how much
I paid for the trip and how long it was.

~~~
forinti
Rio cab drivers are the worst. I hate going to Rio because you simply can't
escape people trying to con you all the time. Brasilia and São Paulo are a lot
better in this aspect.

~~~
zorked
Amen to that. And it's not just cab drivers.

Their culture explains a lot about the state of things in the city/state.

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lanevorockz
Brazil has serious no go zones, some areas can get you killed just for
trespassing. Anyways, that's probably why this feature even exists. Good part
is that lots of Brazilians are tech savvy ( on a much higher rate than in US
), so this would fail quite frequently.

My guess is that Uber will record drivers that commit fraud and they would be
affected over time. One point, taxi drivers are famous for making way worse
frauds than what they do at Uber and with no way for you to file a complaint.

Peace

~~~
netsharc
Heh, Uber's new motto: it's a less terrible scammy taxi experience!

~~~
fjsolwmv
It sounds bad but it's actually good -- competition is causing inprovement.
Rome wasn't built in a day.

~~~
drb91
Ahh yes competition between VC funds and the enterprising entrepeneurs of Rio.

~~~
shiburizu
This is a real problem in latin American countries where the taxi system is
broken and run by ignorant older men (often with state subsidy) that provide
inadequate service. Pleasant then, that the government likes to block said VC
funds (Costa Rica).

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forinti
I stopped using Cabify because their drivers would park a few blocks from the
pickup point and wait for me to cancel the ride.

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raverbashing
So the question is: why is the "uberspy" Uber app not cancelling the ride once
rider and car are not on the same location anymore?

~~~
prostoalex
Just from personal anecdotal experience I can point a couple of legitimate
cases:

1) Calling an Uber for someone else.

2) When traveling abroad with no data plan, I'd use hotel WiFi to call up a
vehicle, but then lose the connectivity as soon as I got in the vehicle.
Unlike the experience described in the article, the quote provided at the
dispatch time was fixed, not an estimate, so overcharging was never an issue.

~~~
raverbashing
Yes, but

1) driver and requester would become distant at the start of the ride, not at
the end

2) disconnections are different from detecting a distance and you would
usually get a connection (some time) after you left the vehicle.

Maybe the user could have a "terminate ride now" button (which is subject to
abuses as well, but might be a better user experience)

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yial
It might be a hope that people on vacation have enough velocity to miss the
charge as they might be using Uber frequently and not notice until they are
back in their home country.

Or that the effort involved is so great that people write off the ~$100 or odd
so dollars that the scam cost them.

~~~
itake
to the driver's perspective, they may of just wasted 4 hours driving around in
time, fuel, and wear and tear if its successful, that seems like a big risk.

~~~
usrusr
Those four hours would be spent driving for customers on other networks, or
for cash.

I can't imagine that Uber did not have a solution for this all these years
since we seem to only be seeing reports now. But I could easily imagine stuff
like that getting lost over time when there is sufficient turnaround in the
department of "moving fast and breaking things". If there even are people who
have the explicit responsibility of making sure that the company's basic
business formula is kept intact, they will be the ridiculed naysayers in an
environment of yes-men.

~~~
ohyes
You get a bad rating and get fired as a driver, presumably. My guess is that
the pay is now so bad that Uber can’t find enough drivers so bad drivers go
unpunished.

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soneca
_" Did the driver really think that I wouldn’t request Uber to fix the fare,
however cumbersome the process might be?"_

I assume a lot of (business) travelers use the company's Uber account and
don't care much about an extra USD10.

Still, these apps' review system, GPS recording, and payback process make them
much, much, much better than the regular taxi in Brazil. Specially in Rio.

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forapurpose
It's an interesting side-effect of Uber's low-friction payment system. In a
taxi, it can't happen because the driver must end the trip in order to process
your payment - friction helps in some ways. I'm not saying Uber should discard
their low-friction system, but they need to engineer it so that the fraud is
as impossible as it is in a taxi.

Another point: If the fraud was going the other way, if it was costing Uber
money, then I expect the problem would have been solved long before it reached
the attention of HN. It's like the old story (or maybe urban myth) of
supermarket checkout barcode scanners - the supermarkets argued that the error
rate was normal, until someone pointed out that a large majority of the errors
were in the supermarkets' favor. Oops! but not oops.

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philip1209
What happens if you are in the right in a dispute against Uber, support
refuses to refund the ride, and you issue a chargeback? Do you get perma-
banned? I've often wondered this, eg with Airbnb.

~~~
kalecserk
Pretty sure it will get you banned from their services. Source: work with
payment systems

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tgsovlerkhgsel
I don't understand why this happens (often enough to be a serious problem).

Uber should be motivated to catch and stop this because the extra revenue from
the scams is almost certainly not worth the loss of users that will result.

It should also be easy for Uber to detect this since they collect location
data from both phones. Sure, one of the two could be faking the data, but they
could check both traces for plausibility (this might be why they collect
location data even for a few minutes after the trip has ended - to get a
baseline), and even if they don't apply any advanced smarts, it should be easy
to check whether a driver got caught doing this repeatedly with unrelated
customers.

Is it just drivers trying it without realizing that it is unlikely to benefit
them in the long term, or Uber being bad at their job?

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sschueller
It's somehow funny how all these abuses are occurring in an industry that had
rules put in place to prevent exactly that from happening. Same goes for
hotels.

Sure maybe the rules need updating but using a loop hole to just completely
ignore all of them and the having its users complain about 'unfair business
practices' is just mind boggling.

Uber is becoming the mob 2.0

~~~
dpatru
Other comments here indicate that Uber scams are not as bad as taxi scams.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Does that matter? They’re still scamming and that’s bad.

~~~
jopsen
Yes, things can be better without being perfect.

Don't let perfection get in the way of improvement.

Plus, with uber you can easily give a low rating, then drivers will disappear
from the platform within long. This is why behavior like this isn't
widespread, and why it's better than taxis..

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Natsu
And here I thought it was bad when they tried to get you to pay a few hundred
more BRL up front for a trip from SP to Santos.

Also, nobody seems very clear on the point that the trip seems to include the
toll you may face going between them. To say nothing of whether your driver
has enough gas for this trip and needs gas money. That drive can be very
interesting when you're going on fumes.

Yeah, it's interesting. I suggest carrying some extra cash (but not too much)
if there are places you need to be. If it's something you can schedule, there
are private drivers that cost a bit more but you can arrange things up front.

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rickyc091
I'm going to give some newer drivers the benefit of the doubt about how Uber
works. I requested a driver from the airport once, and he didn't seem very
sure how to navigate around the city. The GPS was a bit spotty going in and
out at times, so he had to rely on memory. When he finally dropped me off, the
fare kept going. He only stopped the fare when he arrived back at the airport.
My guess is the new driver was doing airport runs thinking he would get the
money for the whole route, from and to the airport.

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microtherion
Same happened to me with Lyft in the US once. It's not out of the question
that this was a genuine oversight on the part of the driver in my case.

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dawnerd
Same thing happened to me with lyft last week in Orlando. Not only did the
driver take the longest route but never ended the fare.

[https://photos.app.goo.gl/mPZayvcX93CvnZ1fA](https://photos.app.goo.gl/mPZayvcX93CvnZ1fA)

Was actually dropped off on the left. Lyft was really fast about correcting it
and giving credit.

Lesson here is make sure you have an idea what the fare should cost.

~~~
aspett
I had an identical experience on an almost identical route a month ago. The
lyft driver didn't stop the fare after dropping off at the hotel, making the
final charge over $50. Thankfully Lyft amended the trip to reflect the true
destination and it was resolved very quickly.

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jonathanjaeger
This happened to me in Rio last month. They requested I write in Portuguese
and luckily I was with someone who does (and didn't need a bad Google
translate conversation). I got refunded right away for what it's worth. It's
pretty aggravating the driver did this to someone who tipped them at the end
of the ride very generously.. wonder if I also got a bad rating too.

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stpe
When reaching my destination, the Uber-driver said: "Give me 5 stars and I'll
give you 5 stars". I questioned that practice and said I will give my rating
in due time. The driver got upset and started to rant about how I never would
be able to request an Uber again because he would give me a 1-star rating if I
didn't rated him 5 at once...

~~~
brianwawok
I think for the good of the system you agree to swap 5 but really do 1.

Ratings only work if the bad guys get dinged.

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codedokode
The driver can ask to show your screen when giving the rating.

~~~
notatcomputer68
I believe uber supports revising ratings so you could show a five and take it
away later.

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marsrover
Seems like Uber should track the distance of the rider’s phone from the
distance to the driver’s phone.

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reese_john
Counterpoint: I live in Rio de Janeiro and this has never happened to me. In
fact I've requested fare reviews several times(bad routing) and the customer
service has been nothing but stellar.

~~~
aditya
Was it in portuguese or English? I'm on my way down next week

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elchief
Gee, I wonder why cities instituted licenses for cab drivers...

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jaked89
This is not unique to Uber, ordinary taxis do it all the time, globally. If
anything, Uber should be more equipped (in theory) to deal with it, as it has
an open review system.

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rwmj
Why couldn't he add a comment when he was in Brazil?

~~~
drdaeman
The app shows and hides different options based on the country. I haven't run
into any scams or asked for refunds while travelling, but I guess this was the
case for the refund comment field.

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IkmoIkmo
Had this experience in Western Europe as well, but Uber refunded me on short
notice (after me asking).

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Razengan
This is also a common struggle in South Asia and the Middle East as well.

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dreampeppers99
I live in Brazil and I use Uber for years this never happened to me.

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twfarland
Brazil is becoming a parody of itself

