Jimmy Quach had been working part time as an Uber Eats delivery driver in Albuquerque, N.M., for two months when he was scammed out of his earnings. After a customer canceled a Taco Bell order, he received a phone call from a person claiming to be Uber support. The person asked him to log out of his account, send a photo of himself for verification purposes, and type in a bank account number as a payment method in the Uber Eats app.
Quach followed the instructions and lost the $337.36 in his account. That was in April. When he asked Uber for his money back, the giant ride-hailing company said no. “We determined that there was no evidence to suggest that your account was compromised,” a representative from Uber Greenlight’s Account Security and Risk team told him in an online chat, a screenshot of which was seen by MarketWatch.
Jimmy Quach does deliveries for Uber Eats in Albuquerque, N.M.
Jimmy Quach
But after MarketWatch contacted Uber in June to ask about the incident, Quach received a message from a different representative, who said she was from Uber’s Priority Support. “I understand that someone illegitimately accessed your account,” she said. The representative apologized “for the length of time it took to receive your stolen earnings,” and Quach got his money back. “What happened to this driver is frustrating and appears to be the result of a scam by a third-party bad actor,” an Uber spokeswoman told MarketWatch. Getting scammed made Quach wary of doing deliveries for a bit, but he said he has since tried again when he has free time while going to trade school to be an electrician. “I just want to make sure that fellow drivers are aware of the types of scams that can be done by people who claim to be good,” he said. Quach and some other app-based delivery workers for companies like Uber Technologies Inc.
UBER,
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DoorDash Inc.
DASH,
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Instacart and Just Eat Takeaway’s
JET,
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Grubhub have something in common: …