I’m a Lyft / Uber driver. This scam is something that is joked about in the forums. The one time that I know that someone bragged about doing this, several of us contacted the service with their name as well as the screenshot that they posted bragging about their payday. Folks may not believe it, but we police ourselves. There are far too many drivers on the road and that means less money for us – we do ANYTHING we can to get rid of the shit drivers. Snitches get better working conditions.
That said, if you want to know the truth, it is far harder on the driver than the pax. We are accused of fraud by Uber or Lyft more often than not. They don’t want to piss off their passengers – they have more than enough drivers, so it doesn’t matter if our working conditions are shit or not. I’ve been accused of fraud twice. I also had dash cams to back up my claim. No apologies for the accusation of fraud. No apologies for giving my phone number to a douchbag that threatened to beat the shit out of me and sue me. No apologies for accusing me of finding my still photo of the vomit from the internet. Nope. Send in the video and a snark-ridden email stating that in the future my account could be terminated for fraud but they are releasing $180 into my account for the vomit.
That said, on a good Saturday night I can make $400 between 10PM and 4AM. I lose money if someone vomits in my car. Even if I run home and get my Little Green cleaner, it will still take the rest of the night for the smell to disappear. Beyond this, even if I’m not accused of fraud, I’m been threatened violence if I turn in the vomit. I’ve had folks hand me $20 and tell me that they better not see a bill on their account. And guess what? Every single vomit has always ended up with a 1-star rating as folks know this is going to ding them badly.
And when our stars start to go down, our rides start going away and we are eventually deacivated.
Anyhoo…it is just more shitting on the poor folks that are doing everything they can to survive by folks upset that our service costs a quarter of a taxi – i.e., even at 4x Surge YOU ARE GETTING A DEAL. But please, everyone shit all over the drivers. Me? I have a great day job…I do this for fun. Which is it 90% of the time. The 10% when I have douchebags and vomiters and other assorted assholes? Yeah, not so much…but the other 90% of the time USUALLY makes up for it. Still, I don’t think I’m doing it much longer…I’ve got a few years in this game and it seems like too much.
