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.
I thought the same, but people often order Ubers for each other, or share a ride where the payer party gets out first.
A more useful feature would be to make payments subject to a confirmation and don't allow the costumer to request a new ride until payment has been made (or disputed). You already have to leave review and (skip) tip after every ride anyway.
Just yesterday, an Uber driver half way through the route started taking me away from the destination. I protested and he said his GPS froze. I don't buy that because navigation was never a problem for any taxi/Uber driver in my city before, with or without GPS. I gave him one star and Uber returned the extra fees. I think the honest display of bad reviews is all that stands in the way of abuse and enables Uber's popularity to rise.
You could also give him the benefit of the doubt.
Most uber drivers I've met have been very polite, and very concerned about bad ratings.
I had a driver who got lost once, and he just stopped the trip and took me to my destination -- because he would rather go a few miles out of pocket than risk a bad rating.
I thought Uber has diverged from per-minute per-mile billing and settled on a fixed quote based on optimal distance at the time of dispatch. The past few rides the amount I got quoted in the app was the exact amount they billed.
They charge the quoted fixed rate unless your ride diverges from the app's recommended path by more than a certain distance. I've annoyingly gotten hit by this a few times when my driver made a wrong turn.
I thought that was the whole idea behind Uber, no more taxi scams. Might as well just call a Yellow cab, if drivers are going to pull this kind of thing.
Because when the rated party also rates the rater, ratings are essentially useless. The question you ask yourself is: is this person so absolutely awful as a passenger/driver that I'm willing to risk being kicked off the platform to get them kicked off?
You can’t see how the other person rated you before you rate them in Uber. Also this would explain why you’d always rate high, not choose two stars over one which is still a bad rating.
Airbnb has this problem though. A loud apartment on the highway will have no mention of it being on the loud highway. Just ratings like “5 stars, great for early risers!”
Airbnb has no motive to fix it because their service looks great with rating inflation.
If there’s a problem with Uber’s rating system, it’s that it’s a five-star system.
I thought I was the perfect Uber passenger (always on time, sat quietly) until I saw my rating. It was 3.5/5. Too arbitrary to be actionable. Is it because I’m a gringo living in Mexico? Should I start small talk more often? Tip them in cash? Is it because I only use it to go to the airport which is a long and traffic-ridden drive which must not be fun for the driver? Or is 3.5 actually a good rating because it’s above 3.0, etc.
> Airbnb has no motive to fix it because their service looks great with rating inflation.
They have no motive to fix it if they have an incredibly short term view of things. It's fairly obvious that this damages the entire platform over time.
Framing a stupid decision as rational because it's rational if you squint enough doesn't ring true. It's rational to think ahead a bit and take into account secondary and tertiary effects.
> If there’s a problem with Uber’s rating system, it’s that it’s a five-star system.
"Single axis" ratings systems are unintuitive, unreliable, prone to "gaming", and thus often self-defeating.
I think person-to-person services should have at least 2 rating axes:
• Was the service rendered [as advertised]? Yes / No
This would be for whether the driver dropped you off at the destination, or the seller delivered the advertised item, or the room and facilities matched the description.
A simple confirmation that the contract was completed; emotions should not enter into this rating.
• How do you feel? Disappointed / Neutral / Pleased
This must be presented in such a way that users DO NOT ASSUME that "Neutral" == "Bad." It should be OK to rate Neutral, because that's how we feel about most of the things in life.
I believe this was the original intent of the 5 star systems to begin with: 3 would be neutral/average/okay, 4 would be above average, and 5 would be exceptional/rare.
Or, since they are STARS, even 1 would be good.
But in practice, our collective psychology thinks anything <5 is bad.
Maybe introduce tomatoes or poo in addition to stars. Stars would be how good it was, and poo would be how many things annoyed you.
Why? In a situation where repeat encounters are rare, and each party cannot see the other party's rating until they've submitted theirs (or not at all), what's the risk of giving an accurately-bad rating? Also, how is rating 2 stars less likely to trigger retaliation than rating 1 star?
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.
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.
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
If I recall, just a copy of every e-mail from Uber, about 5 minutes cutpasting into an online form
It seems people here don't understand how credit cards work :) The main reason to prefer them is because the chargeback process is straightforward and heavily biased in favour of the customer.
But chargeback is not legally binding, is it? So you just put yourself in a situation where you received a service and didn't pay for it. I am pretty sure Uber could do something about it if they cared.
You will probably open yourself for persecution if you start requesting fraudulent chargebacks. But I imagine credit cards operators will make sure they don't have you as a client before anybody even thinks about calling the police.
They can suspend your account, take you to collections, and put a negative report on your credit score. At least in the US, other countries may be different.
They can always do whatever they want to your Uber account, because TOS’ are jokes. The rest they can only do to your CC company, they can’t ding your credit report or anything of the sort. I don’t know where you’re getting that idea.
A quick google search reveals lots more, and none that I saw saying companies can’t come after you for a disputed charge. Most won’t, and most of those that do will only do it if they can clearly show they’re in the right, and you should be able to beat any collection attempt if they aren’t, but they can try.
A merchant is entirely within their right to send you to collections and pursue you personally. There is no legal language in any merchant or processor agreement that prohibits it.
Gym memberships involve a contract and recurring payments, and the contract is usually not in your favor. A one time charge to an Uber driver is not similar.
The lack of an agreement wouldn’t help you anyway. It would be theft of services, no different than taking a cab and running off after refusing to pay.
Sounds like a victory for them. Isn't that the way Airbnb works too if the renters trash your apartment? Airbnb would offer you maybe $50 for $2000 worth of damages/clean up, and keep dicking you around (maybe change it to $100) until you give up and accept.
This doesn't sound right. I've always paid exactly what the app told me the ride would be when I ordered. It looks like Uber covers the delta if the price goes above the quote when you order. https://www.uber.com/ride/how-uber-works/upfront-pricing/
The upfront pricing was a relatively recent development -- it's possible the other commenters were talking about a time before that, when there was some variation in what your trip might end up costing.
Well, YMMV... A long time ago I took a taxi in Beijing (this was way before Uber was even thought of though). When we stopped at my destination the driver quickly unplugged the meter and then asked me for twice what it said. I knew this because I was traveling on a shoestring and wanted to know how fast the meter went for future reference so I had been looking very carefully at it. Maybe I was just unlucky...
The particular scam you mention is impossible with an Uber-like platform, as payment is made via the app, and there's no way for the driver to massively increase the fare in the last moments of a ride.
"Well, YMMV"
No, your mileage cannot vary, because it's tracked in the app.
One could wonder if that is systematic and intenional. Like Uber is over-charging the passenger, but within estimates, and, relative to that over charging under-paying the driver, and netting the difference themselves. Just a guess, not that I have any clue if thats even possible or actually the case. Can also be just drivers over charging customers, Taxis sometimes have a similar issue. Or I am just a sceptique person in general.
You pay a single price for your trip, you don't pay for the time and distance of the ride. When you agree to the trip, you see the price ahead of time and it's fixed. So what the support person is saying that since it didn't affect the price of your trip, you're not getting a refund.
> 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.
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.
That's even more worrisome, then. I didn't have any problems, when I took the same trip with the local friend, and the taxi drivers even laughed when she told them, how much I had previously paid.
Sounds like the startup fee is too low compared to the metered fee. Otherwise taxis would be keen to get you off their back so they could collect another startup fee...
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.
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).
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.
When we're calling a cab/uber/whatever to go home from a party for multiple people, each person will get dropped off in a different place, and the one who ordered the ride may not be the furthest destination and last one off.
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.
I may add that the payments (or prices) in local money often confuses foreigners, besides not having enough "reference points" to understand if - all in all - the fare is correct, they may also be confused by the exchange rate, (reserved to non-Brazilians/people not familiar with the country):
quick, how many US dollars are R$78.50? and 42.80?
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.
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.
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.
I’m not super familiar with Uber’s signup, but I was once interested in just seeing the details of it as a driver. I ended up with two approved accounts by accident. Albeit one was for Uber eats and the other for Uber driving. But they were not appreciably different.
Disclaimer: I never actually performed any rides or deliveries on the platform. At least not at the juncture.
I had quite some time previously done it for a few days during concert “surges”.
idk, you can fake the GPS to show you on another ___location very easily, but to scam a drive, as in following a road at some speed you would need a custom application that can do that.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I spent around 2 years in different countries in South America before this and I guarantee you the situation was worth without uber. Getting scammed was guaranteed, I was consistently more concerned about getting robbed or killed. 90% of the stories I heard of people getting robbed in South America were from cab drivers. Chloroform rags being tossed in the back seat, Guns pulled, Driving to a bad part of town and getting jumped by the cabbies friends, etc...
Definitely not. I live in São Paulo, where the situation is much better than Rio, for example, but still.
With Uber you have a much lower probability of being scammed and a much higher probability of getting your money back after it (with taxis the probability of getting your money back is basically zero).
And by the way the probability of being scammed at all increases not only by being a foreigner, it increases only by being from another place and not knowing the city. There are dozens of cases of friends of mine born in São Paulo who got scammed by taxi drivers in RJ. With Uber/Cabify/99 this became much less common.
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..
The existing rules were even less effective than what Uber is doing, though. One of the reasons why I use Uber when in an unfamiliar area is because of the significantly lower risk of scams.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.