My wife’s Uber account (for both rides and food) is banned for life because she had a sleazy driver aggressively come on to her and when she went to get out of the car he said “I know where you live now” and drove off. She complained to Uber, they did nothing other than say “the driver left negative feedback on your ride” and her account got instantly banned. Follow up calls to them just said she “broke terms and conditions and there’s nothing they can do”.

For perspective, she had a similar sleazy taxi driver years ago, who she complained about to the taxi company. He was fired immediately and the taxi company offered to help my wife with going to the police if she wanted to (and offered the in-car video).

Thankfully we still have taxis locally, but the drivers have told me their numbers have dropped and Uber is winning.

Wow, that's great to hear the taxi company stepped up, but I'm completely shocked by it! In the decade of taxi experiences prior to Uber/Lyft/ridesharing almost every taxi experience was absolutely awful. Driving erratically, on the phone, can't (or won't) take cards, won't take the route I said, literally kicking me and my spouse out of the cab and yelling at us for saying they needed to make a left turn instead of right (we lived in the area and knew where we were going). I'm convinced that a taxi driver has to literally kill someone before any action will be taken against them. I've found that Uber/Lyft usually tends to side with the rider but, like you shared, that's not always the case. The mutual rating system is a net plus IMO. Every cab company is different I guess, but I will never set foot in a cab again out of principle.

I've found the taxi drivers here to be really good. Most are older career-driver types who are really nice and know the city back to front, unlike the Uber drivers who are looking at their GPS more than the road or take wrong turns repeatedly.

I think location matters lots, the last city I lived in I avoided taxis at all costs because I found them to be more like you're saying... aggressive, clueless, dirty, etc.

The house always wins.

It's past time to nerf these yahoos. Civilize them. Impose tort, fair and impartial judiciary, right to appeal, property rights, and accountability & transparency.

I'm not on any side, but I would love to make an observation.

> she had a similar sleazy taxi driver years ago, who she complained about to the taxi company. He was fired immediately

This actually scares me more than Uber banning your wife. I'm not saying you or your wife lied, but it's sad how just a complaint by a woman can ruin any man's life. (I'm assuming your wife didn't have any evidence and the taxi company just fired the driver due to her complaint.)

I think you missed the part where the poster says the taxi company "...offered the in-car video."

Presumably they watched the aforementioned video recording of his behavior before firing him

You missed the part about the video surveillance

This is such a big thing nowadays and it needs regulation. Dispute a charge on Steam? Banned for life. Return one too many item according to some neural network on Amazon? Banned for life. Do nothing wrong at all? Random chance to wake up to a banned Google account, no recourse. Your business runs on GCP? Bad luck.

There need to be serious consequences for this "the computer made a mistake" bullshit.

Disputing charges with a credit card is an interesting thing. It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back" and the merchant basically being stuck with the tab. Doing a chargeback means the relationship between consumer and merchant is ineffective that they can't resolve their differences normally. That the merchant doesn't want to risk more money on serving such a customer in the future is perfectly rational.

I hate having to dispute charges with the CC company because I don’t like the idea that the merchant gets stuck with the bill, but I have done it on a few occasions where I felt like I had absolutely no recourse. I recently had to do this with one of those gigantic furniture warehouse places. I paid full retail price + delivery and setup changes for a bed. The guys came and set up the bed, but it had some greasy smudges all over the headboard and some other ones issues I can’t recall, so I called to complain and they basically gave me the runaround and said there’s nothing we can do because I didn’t reject the item right away and that it was only cosmetic. I wasted my time begging and pleading with store management and their customer satisfaction department, but there was never any real resolution. In the end they offered me a $100 gift certificate towards my next purchase. I felt insulted and exhausted at that point and kindly informed them that I would be doing a chargeback. “ok”, they said. The next day I got a credit for the full cost, which IIRC was about $900. I honestly felt horrible for doing that because I essentially got the bed free. I suppose the company’s policies simply didn’t allow them to actually do the right thing and fix or replace the bed. Perhaps it was simply less costly for them to eat the coat of a chargeback instead of paying someone to fix the problem or replace it due to labor and other costs.

Some of the chargebacks get eaten by the merchant, and some get eaten by the credit card company’s “satisfaction guarantee” (which is accounted as a form of insurance).

Rational? Maybe for them. But when they refuse to help the consumer, it’s the customer’s right to issue a chargeback. That’s their purpose: to deal with bad merchants. Too many chargebacks can get you dropped from your payment processor. But when the merchant bans you to hide the fact that they suck (from the processor), that’s pretty messed up.

> It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back" and the merchant basically being stuck with the tab.

That's not even remotely true. The merchant absolutely has the ability to dispute chargebacks.

Yes, but the bank takes the money immediately after accepting the chargeback. The merchant can provide evidence and dispute it to get their money back, but it is immediately withdrawn. And, if I’m remembering correctly, along with a fee.

Assuming the merchant is 100% honest and accurate, yes this is rational. If the merchant is error-prone and doesn't want their occasional erroneous (or intentional) overcharges affecting their relationship with credit services, it's also rational.

The credit card company is the one that holds the power I guess. I wonder if someday visa will start threatening merchants who retaliate via bans as an extra card feature.

Previously, Visa(?) had tried to prevent merchants from having separate cash and debit/credit prices (gas stations for example), and they got in trouble with “monopoly laws”. So I wouldn’t hold my breath on them retaliating on merchants who ban customers.

It's not a guaranteed refund. It's just another dispute resolution, but done by the card issuer rather than the merchant.

Often they will side with the consumer and will refund the charges through their various policies, but they also investigate the case and will let the payment go through if there's no actual problem found. There are plenty of cases where consumers didn't even contact the merchant at all and yet still chargeback.

I think most chargebacks are by fraudsters and carderz.

> It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back"

That is actually not true. The credit card company must follow established guidelines and pragmatically look at the available information/user agreement/contract and decide on whether there was a breach of contract. They can not blindly stick the bill to the business.

Merchants can appeal. And if they do, you can be out of luck - they can lie that they did provide you with a service, and you won’t have access to any of their statements to respond to them. It’s many months long process but possible.

Source - happened to me. Ended up relationship with both the merchant and credit card company. And have $2k less in my wallet.

> It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back" and the merchant basically being stuck with the tab.

The merchant is stuck with more than the tab. There's also a chargeback fee, which can range from around $15 to several times that depending on who they use for payment processing.

> Doing a chargeback means the relationship between consumer and merchant is ineffective that they can't resolve their differences normally.

Sometimes it means that the customer didn't even try to resolve the dispute. At one place I worked we always gave a refund when one was requested, with no hassle. Some customers, though, would not ask. They would go straight to chargeback.

I think that because some companies make it a major hassle to get them to issue a refund, some consumers try to do a chargeback first and only call the merchant if the bank requires them to try to settle the issue directly first.

> Some customers, though, would not ask. They would go straight to chargeback.

I was always under the impression that if consumers did this sort of thing too often it would end up hurting them because the CC company would start to flag their account.

Sort of an algorithmic version of "If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole."

maybe if chargebacks are so bad try to invest in better dispute resoluton processes

No this actually puts the merchant and customer on equal footing. The card company has an incentive to please both sides.

It certainly feels illegal to have the threat of a ban when you make a good faith report of fraudulent charges. A business could have a pattern of deliberate overcharges that they layer in with regular transactions with the knowledge that enough users will just give in and eat the fraudulent charge to avoid losing access to the service. If the business has run the numbers and found that it's a net gain in profits from this practice, there would be a reasonable (if completely corrupt) motive for operating the scam.

Regarding the dead sibling comment, it's never RICO.

https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...

As these systems become monopolies - or at least defacto standards - these blanket bans without insight into the process, appeal, or even notification is getting ugly.

Right now, it's "only" a frustration in most cases but what happens when Amazon bans you while PillPack is how you receive your meds?

Sounds like the movie Brazil to me. Or Computers Don't Argue.

“Your business runs on GCP? Bad luck.”

Luck has nothing to do with it. That’s bad planning. Really bad.

The “Does your business run on GCP?” needs to be understood by every VP out there. If you are a software company, and a _cough_ security company, that’s all in on GCP, you don’t know what you are doing.

Can you say more? The risk of account locks seems very similar on any of the major cloud providers? A brief search shows similar complaints on AWS, for example.

Indeed. AWS has kicked customers off too. Never said they didn’t. I’ve heard more stories from people getting booted from GCP than AWS. By order of 10x it seems like. I’m sure someone’s been kicked off Azure too. Hybrid cloud with some on-prem backup solution is the only way to truly be cloud agnostic and protect yourself and your data from deletion due to a variety of issues. GCP kicked off a game developer (and deleted his data). AWS kicked off Parler. What I’m saying is that if you’re a VP in charge of cloud strategy, make sure you have a solid DR plan should you intentionally or unintentionally run afoul of that providers rules. Either from policy or politically. Doesn’t matter. GCP just has more of a track record in my news feed of deplatforming than AWS.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/terraria-developer-c...

> What I’m saying is that if you’re a VP in charge of cloud strategy, make sure you have a solid DR plan should you intentionally or unintentionally run afoul of that providers rules.

Really all you need is a mediocre Plan A: don't run afoul of the providers' rules. It's not hard. AWS hosts a lot of content that's even more offensive than Parler, the thing that got Parler in trouble was they weren't able or willing to act on Amazon's demand that they promptly remove content that encouraged or incited violence. So if you're running a platform that hosts content like that, or you're breaking the law or generally breaking the pretty straightforward rules, yeah, have a Plan B, C and D ready to go at a moment's notice. Most of us aren't running things that cater to people who are into political violence or other liability-causing activities so it's not a thing we need to spend a lot of time and money planning for.

Only exception to this rule would be GCP or any other company that's widely known for atrocious service and capricious, random bans.

That's fair. In my news feed, this is mostly an issue for independent developers than companies (all providers). We are a startup (year and change old) and we have human contacts in GCP. And not because we have personal connections in GCP teams. GCP reached out to us, we have had a few calls and so on, like any normal vendor. Our experience has been totally contrary to what I hear from independent developers.

If you can get a signed enterprise agreement it's not as bad. I would do the same if I was on AWS (in fact, we did at the company I worked for) or Azure. My news feeds have a horror story every few months from someone getting locked out/banned/deleted from GCP though.

Uber Support on Twitter:

"Thanks for bringing this to our attention, @TheSofaaa . We believe this is due to a technical bug, which we are actively investigating. We apologize to you and any other drivers who may be impacted, all of whom will be fully refunded."

It's kind of sad that these days the only way to get real support is to make noise on Twitter. And probably 95% of the time posts don't get that initial snowball to make noise.

I suspect it’s not really the public nature of Twitter that makes its responses better, it’s simply that internal procedures empower people manning social media to fix customer problems more effectively than the normal customer support channels.

I don’t have Twitter, but I have complained to companies via Facebook (which at this point I don’t notably use either, but still have an account) private messages, and have had my problem fixed efficiently after complete failure via multiple other methods of contact. (Those companies being Vodacom South Africa who kept sending me some customer’s invoices, and Uber Eats, which made a complete mess of an order in multiple ways.)

Yeah that's true. I was at an acquaintance's party on the rooftop of a sleek, modern apartment building near Berkeley and a tile came loose and almost fell through the floor, opening up a void into some machinery that this friend could have easily fallen through and gotten seriously injured, but with quick reactions we saved them from falling through.

The acquaintance didn't care to do anything about it so I sent e-mails to their property management the next day, and got no response. I then shamed the property management co on their Facebook page in comments with photos of the void and that got a prompt response.

To be clear, I’m saying that I sent private messages to the company on FB, I didn’t post comments to any public location. From a company’s point of view, there wouldn’t be any difference between ignoring my emails or ignoring my FB messages, it’s purely a procedural difference in how they respond to one vs the other.

When will people realize Uber is a bad and evil company. From the get go, with waht they did to others in the sector, how they treat drivers and clients... I really can't believe anybody is still using them...

But they were cheaper!

... while illegally operating at a loss without a permit to drive the competition out of the space.

TBH, I think the understated selling feature for Uber/Lyft was that they'd show you a price in advance of actually summoning the car.

No reason a taxi service couldn't offer the same experience, but you see a lot of scenarios where that's not an option.

Before Covid, I'd go to the head office in the suburbs of Chicago twice a year. The first few times, I took a taxi from the stand and watched powerlessly as the meter ticked up and up, not knowing when it would stop. With Lyft, I could at least see if it would be $25 or 65 before I agreed to summon the vehicle.

In other news, I wish Metra would go straight to and from O'hare.

The difference is that taxi services usually had one single rate no matter the time or day (at least where I'm at).

But that doesn't mean you know the exact rate between two arbitrary points, especially if there are taxes or tolls.

You don't know the exact rate with Uber or Lyft, either. It depends on how long the trip ends up taking, how far the trip ends up taking, etc.

I quit using Uber a few years ago when I was overcharged a higher surge multiplier than I agreed to and support was adamant that it couldn’t have been a bug.

Indeed. My account has been locked since 2015 due to a similar edge case.

My card was stolen after taking a ride so I reported it. This prevented a ride charge from going through. Uber locked my account, which then prevented me from paying.

Uber support's assistance was Kafkaesque.

They advised that I could reactivate my account by logging in and paying the balance. I told them I couldn't. Around and around we went.

So I just use Lyft now.

Whether or not it is fair, people should be aware that chargebacks are a nuclear option, at least in the US.

Sometimes they get hailed as a magic wand on consumer-advocate sites, but if you issue a chargeback with your bank, you should be prepared to completely sever relations with the vendor.

In my wife's case, Uber compounded the bad experience of a blatant overcharge by casually, automatically dismissing her when she flagged it with them, with no option to appeal to a human. Sloppy business practice built on sloppy automation. Permanently severing relations with them was a really easy call.

> after she was overcharged by a driver

How's that? Drivers don't set the fare, Uber does.

> she was overcharged by a driver

Drivers don't charge riders - Uber does.

When she got out of the Uber, the driver continued driving for a long time before "ending" the ride, and the tab ran the entire time which racked up extra charges.

I thought the ride automatically ended, geo-fenced to the destination. Is that not the case?

Nope. If you've ever taken an uber/lyft ride before you will know that the driver has to tap the end button in order for the final bill to show up on your phone app.

Auto-ending rides doesn't even make sense. If the final destination pin happens to be in the middle of a highway off ramp (due to a map error) would you want the app to "autoend" the ride on the offramp (and kick the passenger out on the shoulder), or let the driver do the sensible thing, get off the ramp and pull over to a safer location to let the person off?

This case happens especially often at airports, where the passenger drop off area can literally be represented on the maps as "side of the highway" but in fact, there are traffic loops that the driver needs to navigate in order to comply with traffic rules and routing at airports.

nope. As a driver, you never know when your passenger is gonna be like, "I'm gonna change my mind, let's go all the way to santa barbara instead". Both you and UBER/lyft want that ride. Surprised-not-surprised that uber doesn't send the client app a message asking for approval.

I once suggested my driver to drop me off before the destination as it was more convenient and he said no, that he really had to go to the exact agreed upon destination. I presumed it was for insurance purposes, like if something happens in the interval I was supposed to be in the car.

Definitely lying to you. Thinking about it, what happened to you is kidnapping. If you ask to be let out of the car,the driver MUST honor your wishes and drop you off as soon as it's safe to do so.

Maybe they added this recently:

> Using sensors and GPS data, RideCheck can help detect if a trip goes unusually off-course or a possible crash has occurred. If the app notices such events, we’ll check in on you and offer resources to get help.

https://www.uber.com/us/en/ride/safety/

The driver must end the ride, but the GPS is tracked on both devices and a driver that is far away from the rider on the same "trip" will cause an alert.

I've only been a passenger while someone else has ordered (?) an Uber, but my understanding is you say "take me to X location" in the app and then the ride completes when the GPS coordinates of the car roughly match that of the endpoint. Even if doing a multi-part trip (e.g. to drop off multiple people in different places) this is negotiated beforehand and accounted for.

How did this "attack" work, did the driver override the destination somehow?