Slightly negative PR for having the monopoly in the long term? I'd take the negative PR any day.
Jail time for fraud?
Re:Uber's playbook for sabotaging Lyft
by jjoonathan on Wednesday August 27, 2014 @10:59PM
(#8235737)
Have you seen people go to jail for parking domain names? We aren't talking about stealing credit card numbers here.
> the risks of using customer's credentials in such a careless and ridiculous way many magnitudes higher than the potential rewards
Are you sure? What are the risks of parking a username? I doubt it's illegal and I bet they could obfuscate the traffic well enough to make it very difficult to prove to a court that they were the ones doing it. The only downside seems to be a bit of slightly negative PR (i.e. the assumptions of those who jump to conclusions) when Lyft detects the widespread parking.
Meanwhile, the upside is the expected value of their most profitable customers times the probability that they will switch to Uber+Lyft or 100%Lyft.
Low risk, large upside... I don't think this is as bad a business proposition as you make it sound like.