Trying to think through how Hell must have worked, Uber must have decoded Lyft's encrypted Rest APIs and were able to hit an endpoint that returned the 8 neares

Trying to think through how Hell must have worked, Uber must have decoded Lyft's encrypted Rest APIs and were able to hit an endpoint that returned the 8 nearest available rides given a user and geolocation. Given a large metro area such as LA, you would probably need to make hundreds of requests with fake geolocations to be able to map out the whole area. You would probably only need to do it maybe every 5-10 minutes to get decent resolution for a semi-live map. Depending on Lyft's rate limiting you might get by with in the order of dozens of fake accounts. Given Lyft's scale this would probably be small undetectable noise in their analytics and wouldn't really degrade their systems. I would say it's only semi-shady, probably doesn't rise to the level of civil or criminal lawsuits.