Drunk man accidentally takes $1600 Uber ride from West Virginia to New Jersey

For sure, i agree with you but i was posing the question to see what others thought. My opinion is that a drunken person should still be held responsible for their actions, but there are certain instances where they can definitely be taken advantage of since they are impaired and i would hope that there are some avenues people can explore should this ever happen to them.

No exactly the same, but your idea is a bit like secured credit cards: you give the bank $x as collateral, and that x is your credit limit on the card. If you want to lower you credit limit, withdraw. If you want to raise it, put more money in.

Sort of, if Uber charges the card at the start of the trip, you might be safe, but what if they charge at the end? Somebody still owes somebody else a lot of money.

With fine grained limits on certain types of transaction you get more security. Markets now are very scalable and there is little to stop an exploit ordering pizza from every shop in a 20km radius, or a thousand tonnes of crushed rock from a quarry. But it should be fairly secure to stop the transaction at the bank.

Oh yeah, I agree that more fine grained permissions would be fantastic and a feature I’d love to see. it’d be a bit hard to work it out though. Maybe you add a series of vendors to your online banking per category? So like, you make arbitrary “accounts”, assign vendors to those accounts, and they “pull” from those.

Yeah well as I said above, my bank can already assign my transactions to categories, so they could just have limits on spend for categories per unit time (hour, day, week, etc).

@Boundegar too

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Rule number one of responsible self intoxication is that you don’t try to get out of consequences for doing stupid things.

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And rule number one of responsible humanhood is don’t get ahead by taking advantage of people who are compromised.

Contract law is mostly designed to to give power to and take away power from people who don’t follow rule number one. It isn’t particularly useful for determining morality unless you are a libertarian.

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Sure, but for example you know you might end up drinking a lot at a bar and decide to do the responsible thing and take an Uber, but like this gentleman you accidentally accept a trip that is quite expensive and in your intoxicated state you weren’t fully aware of what you were agreeing to. As i said above, it is my opinion that said person is still responsible for paying the trip but i do find the circumstance predatory because judgement was impaired and accepted a transaction under diminished cognition… which can absolutely make a contract void. It’s just a circumstance that would need to be fought in court and the end result is not guaranteed to go one way or another in what i could find online.

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Mind you, I am not a lawyer and I am in no doubt there will be at least one willing to take up the cudgels on behalf of this “poor victim”. There always is if the money is big enough.

I think that’s going to be the problem. $1400 isn’t nearly big enough for most lawyers to take on even a guaranteed winner of a case. The individual could try their luck representing themselves in small claims court if they wanted.

Now, a class action lawsuit representing all the Uber passengers who spent too much on a trip while out of their skull, that’s where the real money lies. Throw in all the stoners whose 2am craving for Thai food was satisfied by UberEats, and we’re looking at a real payday here.

If you’ll excuse me, I have some legal drafting to do.

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