Hilarious that there's not even a consideration that glorious Uber eats the cost. It's just that the driver would have to - obviously, who else? At some point it stops being spin and becomes some kind of ideology.

Uber eats the cost every time you contact a support agent regarding your cancellation fee (assuming that your fee is indeed credited.) :)

Automatically taking responsibility for all cancellations--whether malicious or not--would be a vector for fraud and abuse.

Yeah, just imagine what would happen if a ride sharing company were the victim of massive cancellation abuse.

Uber has the analystics, driver ratings, customer ratings, and all that other data that it needs to deal with fraud, fraud, and bad actors.

The fact that they, by default, delegate this to the customer is incredibly shitty.

Sort of.

If you're a rider or driver with a couple hundred trips, we can be sure that you're legitimate... unless your account has been hacked. Uber accounts are especially valuable to hackers, so we can imagine some percentage of legitimate accounts are making illegitimate ride requests.

If you're a first-time driver, then Uber has done a background check and a vehicle inspection, but there aren't any rider ratings, accelerometer data, etc. yet.

If you're a first-time rider using https://m.uber.com/ to take a ride on a cash-payments enabled product... then there isn't a whole lot of data to go on.

You can read more about what Uber does to prevent fraud at https://eng.uber.com/tag/fraud/

If you have tons of cool thoughts on fraud engineering and are interested in implementing those thoughts on a world-class platform, you can find fraud engineering-related jobs at https://www.uber.com/careers/list/?city=all&country=all&keyw...

> Uber has the analystics, driver ratings, customer ratings, and all that other data that it needs to deal with fraud, fraud, and bad actors

You can have all the data in the world and still make bad decisions.

Sometimes it's cheaper to just pay the customer rather than hiring more engineers to work out a fraud detection algorithm.

I think Uber has realized this.

If they realized it, they shouldn't make the customer do a chargeback to get their money in the situations posted in this thread.