It's an interesting side-effect of Uber's low-friction payment system. In a taxi, it can't happen because the driver must end the trip in order to process your

It's an interesting side-effect of Uber's low-friction payment system. In a taxi, it can't happen because the driver must end the trip in order to process your payment - friction helps in some ways. I'm not saying Uber should discard their low-friction system, but they need to engineer it so that the fraud is as impossible as it is in a taxi. Another point: If the fraud was going the other way, if it was costing Uber money, then I expect the problem would have been solved long before it reached the attention of HN. It's like the old story (or maybe urban myth) of supermarket checkout barcode scanners - the supermarkets argued that the error rate was normal, until someone pointed out that a large majority of the errors were in the supermarkets' favor. Oops! but not oops.