from Hacker News

Florida men scammed more than $1M out of Uber Eats

by heshiebee on 10/15/23, 9:35 PM with 74 comments

• by hn_throwaway_99 on 10/15/23, 11:59 PM

  There wasn't enough information in the article to explain how this scam worked. I understand that they would make large fake orders as customers, which they would then cancel, but what are the normal procedures when that happens? The article says they'd just buy a lot of gift cards, but I don't understand how that wouldn't be immediately detected and how Uber wouldn't have blocked them immediately.

  Does anyone have more details on the logistics of this scam?

• by silverbax88 on 10/15/23, 9:55 PM

  When this story came out a couple of months ago, I didn't really understand how this would go undetected for any amount of extended time. One driver keeps having hundreds of dollars in cancelled orders and there's no tracking of it?

• by paulpauper on 10/15/23, 10:33 PM

  Big companies can have major blind spots like this that in hindsight are obvious, but you'd be surprised what is undetected. Departments cannot easily communicate with other departments about discrepancies--communication tends to be slow; this allows stealthy criminals to get away for quite some time under the radar.

  There was an incident where someone did $100 million of invoice fraud against Meta and Google, until finally caught.

  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/business/facebook-google-...

• by tpmx on 10/15/23, 9:41 PM

  "This worked because Uber Eats provides couriers with prepaid cards they can use to purchase up to $700 to complete customers' orders."

• by mmh0000 on 10/15/23, 11:54 PM

  It’s amazing how much of the fraud-economy is enabled by Gift Cards.

  I wonder if removing gift cards would stop fraudsters or what they’d move onto next.

• by paxys on 10/16/23, 12:24 AM

  The underlying cause here is that companies like Uber simply leave too much room for scams and arbitrage opportunities with their massive "growth" budgets and non-existent abuse detection. Anyone remember the story about the pizzeria owner who made money by ordering his own pizzas when he found out that DoorDash listed his restaurant without his knowledge and was charging customers less than the actual price? Or people who create new accounts whenever they order to always get their food for free via "new customer" promos? In this particular case is there any reason for Uber to not charge customers the full amount when they cancel orders after they have been prepared/shopped for?

• by ada1981 on 10/15/23, 11:33 PM

  I’m a little confused on the scam.

  1. Customer places order for $700 worth of Avacados.

  2. Uber Courier accepts the order; goes to grocery store for which Uber has issued him a $700 debit card that can only be used at that grocery store.

  3. Customer canceled the order, but Uber somehow doesn’t automagically cancel the debit card, so courier buys $700 of visa gift cards.

  4. Somehow Uber doesn’t monitor that issued debit card balances on canceled orders are being spent and they are bleeding $$$.. until it goes over $1MM.

  Is this right?

• by underseacables on 10/16/23, 12:24 AM

  Honest question, how do you afford to have food delivered so often? Maybe I’m just old but… It seems so incredibly expensive. I imagine people who use Uber eats a lot must be extremely busy, have a lot of money, or just hate cooking.

• by paulpauper on 10/15/23, 10:27 PM

  The two suspects — 21-year-old Trayon Morgan and 38-year-old Roy Blackwood — now face charges of organized scheme to defraud and grand theft following their arrests earlier this month, police say.

  funny how it's some kids who made $1 million will only face state charges, and keep a decent chunk of $, but when it comes to crypto frauds, like insider trading on Coinbase or NFTs, the amount of $ is way smaller, the charges way worse, and the criminals from white collar backgrounds. It shows how the best criminals are not where or who'd you'd ordinarily expect. The lesson is stay away from crypto and keep it state instead of federal.