Totally anecdotal: while travelling abroad I tried to order an Uber with my regular account and card. The process went well up to the point where I could see the price but then failed because my card was not accepted for some reason. Immediately switched to "cash" and the price displayed went down. The original price was 30% higher. The same evening I repeated the same steps with another fare and got the same outcome.
I'm not sure if this was a coincidence, some local policy regarding paying cash vs. card, or Uber doing something shady. But I asked all my friends to compare the price with the driver (or pay cash, although this may be less convenient) if they ever use Uber. I've read articles before that Uber was showing the driver a lower price than the customer in order to give the driver a lower cut. If this is the case then it wouldn't work when paying cash.
There is this [0][1]. As for my example above I don't have nearly enough data to draw a conclusion. But enough for suspicion when combined with the previous links.
It's not fraud to charge different customers different amounts of money for the same service. Fraud requires misrepresentation; failing to volunteer information like "you could get this service cheaper if you paid a different way" wouldn't generally rise to that level.
It may be a breach of contract between Uber and its payment processor, though. Often, credit card merchant agreements prohibit businesses for charging more for credit card payments than for equivalent alternatives. Maybe Uber is just flagrantly ignoring those terms, or maybe it has negotiated its way out of them.
I imagine this would be the case for minor variations. But I could not reproduce such a massive difference simply by refreshing the search (the differences were always after the decimal point). Also the time of day (middle of the week, ~13:00 and same day 22:00) doesn't really suggest surge pricing would explain i, especially twice.
I understand that 2 data point don't really make a reliable dataset.
I'm not sure if this was a coincidence, some local policy regarding paying cash vs. card, or Uber doing something shady. But I asked all my friends to compare the price with the driver (or pay cash, although this may be less convenient) if they ever use Uber. I've read articles before that Uber was showing the driver a lower price than the customer in order to give the driver a lower cut. If this is the case then it wouldn't work when paying cash.