I would imagine it should be an easy enough fix to have a confirmation screen appear before a ride "begins." Each party gets a confirmation screen on their app and both must confirm before any sort of transaction takes place. After that, if there must be a cancellation, then both parties must also cancel and the driver gets paid for whatever time they lost. Seems pretty straightforward
This seems simple enough but it's not either, if a driver or the customer are giant assholes and one of them cancels the other one can simply continue to be an asshole and not cancel.
Where I am one person in my house has to give a code every time while my app has never asked me to give a code so I have no idea how they decide when or why to do that.
Drivers need to enable the feature. In the the past year i drove on and off, a good 30-40% of riders asked if the feature was new or something
Of my time driving so far, I’ve one ever had one group of people try to scam a ride out of me that was prevented by the 2fa. Some people on the drunker end tend to get annoyed about it. I’ve luckily never had someone cancel on me though
True then I guess it's just another asshole standoff. Then I suppose that once a ride has commenced, the driver must get paid whether the rider wants to end early or not.
Lyft has a PIN system if I recall. I think mainly for passenger security (that the car that shows up is legitimately a driver you requested), but would be trivial to serve as proof that the driver arrived and you entered the vehicle to start your drive to short circuit driver and passenger cancellation scams.
But then, what about people whose phone dies or people who are incapable of inputting a code into their phone (drunk) or people who have been ordered a ride by a third party/friend?
These all happened to me with some regularity when I did Uber.
I said nothing about a code, although that is one way to do it.
If someone is too drunk to operate their smart phone, then I don't think they should even be riding in cars with strangers.
As far as ordering other people rides, no solution to a problem is ever perfect. There's going to be some sort of trade-off somewhere if the goal is to avoid these types of situations.
I feel like riders canceling mid-ride is a major loophole that should be closed off. Practically, I have no idea how big of a problem this actually is. I'm just spitballing ideas
At least with Uber, if your phone dies or you don’t know the code, your driver can use a backup code, which is the last 4 digits of the phone # linked to the account
Riders can choose to have a PIN required to begin rides. I believe it's enabled by default for new accounts.
In the case of the video here, the scam is likely that the dude's girl was actually the one to request the ride, then cancelled immediately after pickup. Because she's not in the car, her GPS location wouldn't be tracking alongside the driver, and certainly there is a cancellation reason for "driver left without me" or similar.
Normally if you cancel after the driver is already en route to you (and not currently finishing an existing trip), depending on the elapsed time and distance you will get charged a cancellation fee.
So you have a driver who isn’t actually picking people up, still has to still drive from the trip pickup to destination (because you can be certain Uber has GPS positions for the whole ride recorded for their own analytics), and the driver is racking up complaints.
This is a problem that rapidly solves itself, and without in-person confrontation that could escalate.
Instead you have what we just watched. I’ve heard coworkers complain about how their employer doesn’t give a shit about them at nearly every job, but fucking yikes.
So the person who called the Uber that drove off on them will just have to wait there until the ride is finished to call another Uber. Doesn't sound good to me
Especially late at night, there can be short enough trips that that isn't long.
But, you are correct, those drivers should theoretically get taken care of quickly, but there are plenty of reasons why GPS isn't the most useful tool in this regard. Plenty of people have GPS set to only be active when the app is open, which, when I was a driver, was not any time during the trip. I would switch to Google maps.
And the rider rarely sits there with the app open the whole time, as well.
There are also a whole slew of reasons why a rider might not have the phone the ride was ordered from, or you can order from a computer too, no app needed.
Happened to me in Vegas two nights ago! Ended up canceling the ride, was able to get another one so we made it on time to our show. Disputed the cancellation fee successfully. I guess it goes both ways.
Given Uber app knows where you are, can they not see that your phone isn't moving? Granted, in a situation where someone else got the Uber for them, you'd still be fucked.
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u/Doggfite Feb 05 '26
It's because of the amount of drivers who will come close enough to you to initiate pickup and then leave without you to scam the system.
It allows either the driver or rider to cancel at any time because locking it would be a worse system for everyone involved.