13 ms·

Tell HN: Uber has blocked my account for years, won't tell me why

107 points by figassis 4y ago

Until 2019, I used uber everytime I traveled abroad. Then one day, suddenly I login and it logs me out, says my account is blocked. There was no way for me to reach support or figure out why. We've been using my wife's account since then. I'm just account to travel again, for the first time since 2019, and tried to login to uber, still blocked. I fill the support form, and get an email saying they won't send my request to a support rep until I verify my email. So I click the link and verify. One day later I get an email from a rep saying "I'm contacting them from my second uber account". I had no idea you could have 2 accounts with same email. And if that is the case, it's clearly an accident and I have no idea which account they refer to. And they won't help, no way to reach a human. I don't get how a ride hailing company thinks is't cool to behave like a bank. Any tips on how I can resolve this?

aliqot 4y ago
ok, but why post here and why now after all these years?
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Presumably because the last bit just happened.
- user3939382 4y ago
  It's in the post: > for the first time since 2019, and tried to login to uber, still blocked
  - aliqot 4y ago
    I read that, it didn't answer what I sought to know.
- figassis 4y ago
  Because when it happened the first time, I was too busy having a vacation that I did not want to bother myself dealing with Uber, and just thought, must be a mistake, I'll sort it out soon. Didn't get to travel again until now.
CamelCaseName 4y ago
> Any tips on how I can resolve this? Use Lyft instead and don't support a company that treats you like garbage. I did the same when they charged me $9.99 USD and then refunded me $9.99 CAD. (CAD is worth ~27% less at the moment)
- paulluuk 4y ago
  This makes me think that if it works one way, it might also work the other way. I.e. find a way to pay them in CAD and then refund in USD.
- Bilal_io 4y ago
  Agreed, it's not like we don't have alternatives. UberEATS didn't honor a buy 1 get 1 free promo and I ditched them (after I spoke with customer service) along with Uber ride.
  - oblio 4y ago
    We don't always have alternatives. Lyft is not present in a lot of places, a lot of places don't have good apps for taxis, etc. These aggregators are a plague. Due to their scale and attacks from abusers, they won't disclose anything if you contact support. So you're just abandoned on the wayside...
    - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
      Perhaps just go back to a traditional taxi then? It might cost more, but if you need support, you call their number and get a real person rather than a robot that's sole job is to get you to give up.
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        > It might cost more, but if you need support, you call their number and get a real person rather than a robot that's sole job is to get you to give up. It's been a few years, but my last experience with a taxi dispatcher was them saying "well, what am I supposed to do about it?" when mine was 45 minutes late for my pre-scheduled ride to the airport. Reaching a human isn't a guarantee of non-robotic support.
theideaofcoffee 4y ago
Good luck. I have a similar problem, and filling out a support request doesn't even result in an acknowledgement email and nobody can tell me why. I did find a live support option once by accident and I've been looking for that again, but am unable to retrace my steps to get that back open. I didn't get much further with that either, they didn't seem interested in helping. I've just moved over to Lyft. Not worth my time to fight with Uber when there are other options.
nottorp 4y ago
They probably don't even know why :) Some machine learning decided to ban him. Edit: "Abroad" relative to what though? If to Europe from US, there are other options than Uber. May vary depending on country. Bolt should be present here and there. The Lyft service that someone mentioned doesn't seem to be available in Europe.
- Bilal_io 4y ago
  In what world do software companies let AI make decisions in a black box without spitting out logs or some code that maps to the action it made?
  - nottorp 4y ago
    Ours. Perhaps you have missed all the posts here on HN where some company or other locks up someone's account without the user being told why and without the possibility of having a human review the ban? Most are Google but they're not the only guilty party.
    - rosnd 4y ago
      Is this legal in Europe? https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rules-business-and-organisations/dealing-citizens/are-there-restrictions-use-automated-decision-making_en https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r... >Yes, individuals should not be subject to a decision that is based solely on automated processing (such as algorithms) and that is legally binding or which significantly affects them. I suppose being banned from Uber can very well be something that significantly affects you, especially if you live in a city where it's the primary form of taxi-like transport.
      - Nextgrid 4y ago
        In practice, legality depends on someone willing to investigate the offence and enforce the law. When it comes to the GDPR, that's not happening even for the biggest, blatant offences (Google and Facebook are still around despite breaching the regulation for 4+ years), so do you really think someone is going to bother investigating this?
joss82 4y ago
Maybe because you have "ass" as part of your nickname and perhaps email address too?
- mbg721 4y ago
  If your username there is similar to your username here, that seems likely; "fig" and "ass" together tripped the Scunthorpe filter, but not right away.
mythhouse 4y ago
Same thing happened to me years ago when I traveled to India. Used my american uber account there but got flagged for fraud and suspended. I was told at the time that it was done by an automated system and cannot be reversed. Haven't used uber ever since. Thank god lyft exists.
abdj8 4y ago
Two bad experiences with Uber support - I don't use them unless there is no other option. I have an Uber account with my email id(gmail) with a '.' in it. It so happened that someone else created a driver account with the same email-id without the '.' in it. I am not sure how that account got verified by Uber, I never clicked any link to verify that account. So I keep getting emails of that driver's account, tried talking to an Uber support person, they don't understand the problem with '.' and simply shut me out saying if this is not your account we are not talking to you about it.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  That's true, but that's really on google. anecdote: I got an email one day to me (first and last name) for the receipt of a small medical purchase that definitely wasn't mine. At first I thought was getting scammed. Then I realized, the only thing that was correct was my first and last name. Address, last 4 of PAN, state, everything was incorrect. Upon opening the eml directly I realized it was actually sent to firstnamelastname@gmail.com, whereas my email address is firstname.lastname@gmail.com (note the period). Did some googling, there was in fact someone with my first and last name in the area of the address. I called the phone number given, it was indeed a man with the same first and last name. Explained what happened and forwarded the email. So while, yes, Uber absolutely should be doing better, so should google. I'm guessing someone is going to tell me that's correct behavior according to the spec, and if so, the spec is wrong, full stop. Those are not the same email addresses.
  - misnome 4y ago
    But, they are the same, because google treats them as the same? Are you saying that there is someone registered with exactly the same account name on gmail, except with an added period?
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      yes, I can't speak to the specific algorithm google uses for account lookup, but if an email comes in for firstnamelastname@gmail.com and it doesn't exist but firstname.lastname@gmail.com DOES exist, google will send it to that mailbox.
gregdoesit 4y ago
If it makes you feel any better: the same thing happened to my wife's account. Ironic that I used to work at Uber for ~4 years. Still, there's no way for me to resolve this for me unless I would escalate to someone working at Uber, bypassing customer support - which I'm not doing as it's a lot of work, a lot of annoying people I don't know and it might still not work. Customer support won't fix it, and there's no other way to resolve this. It all goes down to either an ML system making a decision, or a flag was added to your account by some other if-then-else rule. When I was inside Uber, I could escalate tickets, internally, but this is no longer an option. I wrote a longer summary on why such banning happens [1] and why - sadly - as a customer, we cannot do anything about it, until Big Tech prioritizes sorting out these edge cases, or there's regulation passed for them to do so. And if you think Lyft is better: The New York Times ran an article Help! I Was Banned From Lyft and No One Will Tell Me Why [2] where they heavily quoted everything I wrote about why Uber - and Big Tech customer support, in general - works like they do. Lyft is pretty much the same. [1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/scaling-customer-support/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/scaling-customer-support/ [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/17/travel/tripped-up-banned-lyft.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/17/travel/tripped-up-banned-...
- treme 4y ago
  do you have a good reason to not reach out to your network to help your wife? seems odd to not help your SO over something rather helpful for quality of life
  - gregdoesit 4y ago
    @treme most of my former team no longer works at Uber so I don't have direct contacts. Both of us can keep using the app, sharing an account. I am also not a fan of using my network when it's the system that is broken. I might be able to sort this by annoying people working at Uber I don't even know, but it's not a good use of my time, and even then it might not work (when I got similar escalations inside Uber, about a third of them went anywhere).
  - zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
    Maybe his wife doesn't need Uber and it's not a big deal. I haven't used Uber since 2018
sebastien_b 4y ago
Are you European? Could ask them to delete all your data/account, and then they’d have to find it and probably figure it out.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
londons_explore 4y ago
Either don't use it... Or, if you do want to use it, sign up again with a new email address, phone number and payment card. As a bonus, you probably get your first ride free. I sign up again for every ride for exactly this reason. Great for privacy too.
JCM9 4y ago
Uber has turned into garbage and I’ve stopped using them. Ironically they’ve increasingly become the transport option with a terrible customer experience, which is what they set out to change in the first place. The final straw is when I had multiple drivers in a row cancel on me before pickup. When I finally had enough I canceled the ride and then was charged a “cancelation charge” for canceling. The fact that I only canceled after multiple drivers canceled on ME leaving me waiting for 30 minutes was lost on Uber. Since then I’ve sent all my business elsewhere. Per the OP trying to get a human at Uber to apply basic logic to a situation is essentially impossible.
- hericium 4y ago
  > I had multiple drivers in a row cancel on me before pickup. When I finally had enough I canceled the ride and then was charged a “cancelation charge” for canceling. I've had the exact some scenario with Bolt.
- Syzygies 4y ago
  Your credit card company is the entity you can expect to apply basic logic. In the short term, that logic will be to refund your money to keep your annual spend, but not to bother Uber. In the long term, this could raise the fees Uber pays for credit card services. Long before Uber, a JAX airport auto rental was improperly tacking an $8 fee onto every "paid in full" Hotwire reservation. This can add up over a year. When challenged, they lied and claimed it was an upgrade. American Express of course made no effort to protest this, they just refunded my $8. Not very satisfying, but still my best course of action.
  - Shaanie 4y ago
    A credit card chargeback should be used as the last resort, and for good reason: many service providers will permanently suspend your account if you do one. There's typically a thread or two per year where some poor sap gets double charged by Google or similar company, uses a chargeback and then gets their entire account suspended. Poof, all your mails are now permanently gone. So yeah, only do it if you're OK with never using Uber again.
- 4y ago
zoba 4y ago
This happened to me with Airbnb. Despite contacting friends who worked at the company to unban me, I always always re-banned. I resolved it by using a different email address. Something about my primary email was on Airbnb’s shit list and there was apparently no easy way to resolve it. Never had a single issue with the new email.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  The same thing happened to me with Tinder. I guess… because they would never tell me why I was banned, even though my profile is boring and tame and so are all my chats.
exhaze 4y ago
Former Uber engineer - had friend who got "randomly" banned in ~2016/17 and I investigated. Sadly, it's likely the same story as back then, and same story as you see with other large tech companies - false positive fraud detection algo. This doesn't help you much, but just wanted to try and help explain the "why".
smohnot 4y ago
This happened to me too. I opened a new account with a different email address, credit card and phone number (used google voice).
nomilk 4y ago
Could dual sim be an easy solution? (i.e. sign up to uber with a secondary phone number). I don't know if this would work. Quick explainer of dual sim on iPhone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lnEQLVOsH4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lnEQLVOsH4
988747 4y ago
It blocked me in 2018, because I went on extended business trip to US, and tried to convert my personal account to a business one (to get proper invoces for expensing). My activity became suspicious, and now Uber wants scan of my credit card and government-issued ID, which I'm not willing to give it.
distcs 4y ago
Slightly off-topic: Are there countries that have such good local public transit that I don't have to depend on Uber?
- Freak_NL 4y ago
  Lots. Large parts of Europe, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan looks manageable too, etc. It all depends on destination and area of course, but in countries with decent public transport any part where you can't get to by bus or train or ferry tends to have decent local taxi companies to fill in the gaps. I base my travel around public transport almost exclusively. I've never even used Uber or any other service like that. (And obviously, I don't need a car (or ride hailing service) living in a medium sized city in the Netherlands either.)
eloisius 4y ago
This keeps me awake at night. Where I live, Uber is the only ride service, but my account is in a sketchy limbo that is still working for now. Years ago I wanted to drive for one night to try it out, so now my account is stuck as a “partner.” I can’t change my phone number or anything in the app because it tells me to go to the partner site. I can’t log into that for some reason, and I can’t reset my password because it claims my personal info (SSN) is already in use by another account. Of course support is robots that tell me to do the obvious. One day I’m sure my account is going to get roboflagged as an anomaly and I’ll be screwed on the side of the road.
- hedora 4y ago
  Public service announcement: SSN's are not unique, and were never intended to be. They are assigned using an allocation scheme that ensures people of similar age will not have the same SSN, and that allows localities to independently allocate them at birth without creating collisions.
  - PopAlongKid 4y ago
    I don't think any of your claims are true. https://www.ssa.gov/employer/randomization.html https://www.ssa.gov/employer/randomization.html
    - rosnd 4y ago
      SSNs are not unique for a whole lot of reasons. https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/odds-someone-else-has-your-ssn-one-7-6c10406347 https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/odds-someone-else-has-your...
      - PopAlongKid 4y ago
        OK, so the one claim about not being unique has some truth to it. Yes, they are mis-used (either mistakenly or maliciously) to some extent by people they were not assigned to, but they were never intended to be non-unique, which was the primary claim I was responding to, along with the other ones. [edit] There is a related claim (not made above) that is correct, which is SSNs were never intended to be a secret.
mabbo 4y ago
I wonder if this is a symptom of there being too few competitors in most markets. In a very competitive market, having a long-term customer is an incredibly valuable thing. You should want to invest heavily in customer support so that you can avoid losing customers. But in a market with only two competitors (Lyft and Uber) there isn't a need. There's only one other competitor, so how much do you really need to invest in customer support? Spend that money on marketing to steal customers from the other competitor- you'll get a better ROI in terms of number of customers. The same applies to Google of course. What are you going to do, use Bing? Switch your gmail account to someone else? I guess you could get an iPhone instead of Android? As a counter-example, Amazon had to win customer trust early on because nobody trusted online shopping. They invested heavily in customer support. They kept investing in it, as a means to keep customers from switching to new competitors. For a long time, that helped them stay on top. But in the end, we need more diverse markets with more competitors. And at this point, the government ought to be stepping in to make that happen.
dbfx 4y ago
The idea that this is normalized as the way a bank behaves is profoundly scary.
can16358p 4y ago
With all those rules around regulation and GDPR that hardly anyone actually benefits, why aren't there rules that prevent banning users from platforms without a good excuse?
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  GDPR is not enforced strongly enough to matter.
Badass_97 4y ago
They had even blocked my account and its pretty shit. They don't even give any reason.One of many reasons I vote for decentralization.
MichaelRazum 4y ago
I think the interesting question is, is uber aware of it? Like okay, that happens the false positive rate is under 0.001% percent and we try to improve. Maybe if we add this "edge case" the true positive rate would go worse. Then I can undestand it. On the other hand if they are not investigating and do not try to improve, then it is really bad.
drewg123 4y ago
My partner was "shadow banned" from Uber for what we suspect was a payments related reason. No matter what card she put in Uber, she would see "payment declined", even when the card was well below the limit, and she would not see any attempted transaction on the bank website. Uber customer support was non-existent. She eventually got a new phone, made a new account, and gave them a CC number they'd never seen before. Things just magically started working.
flerchin 4y ago
Customer service costs scale linearly with the number of users. This is not a mode of business supported by tech-companies.
juancn 4y ago
I think we've reached the point where we need legislation to force companies to: - Clearly explain all bans and suspensions (which exact rule you broke, which evidence do they have, who made the call) - Provide a clear resolution/complain mechanism with escalation outside the company Apparently competition is not enough for this.
anon223345 4y ago
TBF Uber is now crap, I order UberXL and it was a run down, piece of shit 90s Ford Explorer with a broken shock absorber. Another Uber, the driver tried to convert me to some hardcore conspiracy shit. Uber is trash now, Lyft is slightly better, at least everytime I’ve taken Lyft the cars have been relatively nice. The only time I take them is with XLs to get to the airport though so I’m really only comparing the SUVs
cheri9 4y ago
[dead]
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
I might be wrong, but you will surely get their attention by having a lawyer writing them about your case. You might not solve anything, but at least someone in power will read about your case.

107 points by figassis 4y ago

aliqot 4y ago

ok, but why post here and why now after all these years?

robertlagrant 4y ago
Presumably because the last bit just happened.
user3939382 4y ago
It's in the post: > for the first time since 2019, and tried to login to uber, still blocked
- aliqot 4y ago
  I read that, it didn't answer what I sought to know.
figassis 4y ago
Because when it happened the first time, I was too busy having a vacation that I did not want to bother myself dealing with Uber, and just thought, must be a mistake, I'll sort it out soon. Didn't get to travel again until now.

CamelCaseName 4y ago

> Any tips on how I can resolve this? Use Lyft instead and don't support a company that treats you like garbage. I did the same when they charged me $9.99 USD and then refunded me $9.99 CAD. (CAD is worth ~27% less at the moment)

paulluuk 4y ago
This makes me think that if it works one way, it might also work the other way. I.e. find a way to pay them in CAD and then refund in USD.
Bilal_io 4y ago
Agreed, it's not like we don't have alternatives. UberEATS didn't honor a buy 1 get 1 free promo and I ditched them (after I spoke with customer service) along with Uber ride.
- oblio 4y ago
  We don't always have alternatives. Lyft is not present in a lot of places, a lot of places don't have good apps for taxis, etc. These aggregators are a plague. Due to their scale and attacks from abusers, they won't disclose anything if you contact support. So you're just abandoned on the wayside...
  - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
    Perhaps just go back to a traditional taxi then? It might cost more, but if you need support, you call their number and get a real person rather than a robot that's sole job is to get you to give up.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      > It might cost more, but if you need support, you call their number and get a real person rather than a robot that's sole job is to get you to give up. It's been a few years, but my last experience with a taxi dispatcher was them saying "well, what am I supposed to do about it?" when mine was 45 minutes late for my pre-scheduled ride to the airport. Reaching a human isn't a guarantee of non-robotic support.

theideaofcoffee 4y ago

Good luck. I have a similar problem, and filling out a support request doesn't even result in an acknowledgement email and nobody can tell me why. I did find a live support option once by accident and I've been looking for that again, but am unable to retrace my steps to get that back open. I didn't get much further with that either, they didn't seem interested in helping. I've just moved over to Lyft. Not worth my time to fight with Uber when there are other options.

nottorp 4y ago

They probably don't even know why :) Some machine learning decided to ban him. Edit: "Abroad" relative to what though? If to Europe from US, there are other options than Uber. May vary depending on country. Bolt should be present here and there. The Lyft service that someone mentioned doesn't seem to be available in Europe.

Bilal_io 4y ago
In what world do software companies let AI make decisions in a black box without spitting out logs or some code that maps to the action it made?
- nottorp 4y ago
  Ours. Perhaps you have missed all the posts here on HN where some company or other locks up someone's account without the user being told why and without the possibility of having a human review the ban? Most are Google but they're not the only guilty party.
  - rosnd 4y ago
    Is this legal in Europe? https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rules-business-and-organisations/dealing-citizens/are-there-restrictions-use-automated-decision-making_en https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r... >Yes, individuals should not be subject to a decision that is based solely on automated processing (such as algorithms) and that is legally binding or which significantly affects them. I suppose being banned from Uber can very well be something that significantly affects you, especially if you live in a city where it's the primary form of taxi-like transport.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      In practice, legality depends on someone willing to investigate the offence and enforce the law. When it comes to the GDPR, that's not happening even for the biggest, blatant offences (Google and Facebook are still around despite breaching the regulation for 4+ years), so do you really think someone is going to bother investigating this?

joss82 4y ago

Maybe because you have "ass" as part of your nickname and perhaps email address too?

mbg721 4y ago
If your username there is similar to your username here, that seems likely; "fig" and "ass" together tripped the Scunthorpe filter, but not right away.

mythhouse 4y ago

Same thing happened to me years ago when I traveled to India. Used my american uber account there but got flagged for fraud and suspended. I was told at the time that it was done by an automated system and cannot be reversed. Haven't used uber ever since. Thank god lyft exists.

abdj8 4y ago

Two bad experiences with Uber support - I don't use them unless there is no other option. I have an Uber account with my email id(gmail) with a '.' in it. It so happened that someone else created a driver account with the same email-id without the '.' in it. I am not sure how that account got verified by Uber, I never clicked any link to verify that account. So I keep getting emails of that driver's account, tried talking to an Uber support person, they don't understand the problem with '.' and simply shut me out saying if this is not your account we are not talking to you about it.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
That's true, but that's really on google. anecdote: I got an email one day to me (first and last name) for the receipt of a small medical purchase that definitely wasn't mine. At first I thought was getting scammed. Then I realized, the only thing that was correct was my first and last name. Address, last 4 of PAN, state, everything was incorrect. Upon opening the eml directly I realized it was actually sent to firstnamelastname@gmail.com, whereas my email address is firstname.lastname@gmail.com (note the period). Did some googling, there was in fact someone with my first and last name in the area of the address. I called the phone number given, it was indeed a man with the same first and last name. Explained what happened and forwarded the email. So while, yes, Uber absolutely should be doing better, so should google. I'm guessing someone is going to tell me that's correct behavior according to the spec, and if so, the spec is wrong, full stop. Those are not the same email addresses.
- misnome 4y ago
  But, they are the same, because google treats them as the same? Are you saying that there is someone registered with exactly the same account name on gmail, except with an added period?
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    yes, I can't speak to the specific algorithm google uses for account lookup, but if an email comes in for firstnamelastname@gmail.com and it doesn't exist but firstname.lastname@gmail.com DOES exist, google will send it to that mailbox.

gregdoesit 4y ago

If it makes you feel any better: the same thing happened to my wife's account. Ironic that I used to work at Uber for ~4 years. Still, there's no way for me to resolve this for me unless I would escalate to someone working at Uber, bypassing customer support - which I'm not doing as it's a lot of work, a lot of annoying people I don't know and it might still not work. Customer support won't fix it, and there's no other way to resolve this. It all goes down to either an ML system making a decision, or a flag was added to your account by some other if-then-else rule. When I was inside Uber, I could escalate tickets, internally, but this is no longer an option. I wrote a longer summary on why such banning happens [1] and why - sadly - as a customer, we cannot do anything about it, until Big Tech prioritizes sorting out these edge cases, or there's regulation passed for them to do so. And if you think Lyft is better: The New York Times ran an article Help! I Was Banned From Lyft and No One Will Tell Me Why [2] where they heavily quoted everything I wrote about why Uber - and Big Tech customer support, in general - works like they do. Lyft is pretty much the same. [1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/scaling-customer-support/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/scaling-customer-support/ [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/17/travel/tripped-up-banned-lyft.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/17/travel/tripped-up-banned-...

treme 4y ago
do you have a good reason to not reach out to your network to help your wife? seems odd to not help your SO over something rather helpful for quality of life
- gregdoesit 4y ago
  @treme most of my former team no longer works at Uber so I don't have direct contacts. Both of us can keep using the app, sharing an account. I am also not a fan of using my network when it's the system that is broken. I might be able to sort this by annoying people working at Uber I don't even know, but it's not a good use of my time, and even then it might not work (when I got similar escalations inside Uber, about a third of them went anywhere).
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
  Maybe his wife doesn't need Uber and it's not a big deal. I haven't used Uber since 2018

sebastien_b 4y ago

Are you European? Could ask them to delete all your data/account, and then they’d have to find it and probably figure it out.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

londons_explore 4y ago

Either don't use it... Or, if you do want to use it, sign up again with a new email address, phone number and payment card. As a bonus, you probably get your first ride free. I sign up again for every ride for exactly this reason. Great for privacy too.

JCM9 4y ago

Uber has turned into garbage and I’ve stopped using them. Ironically they’ve increasingly become the transport option with a terrible customer experience, which is what they set out to change in the first place. The final straw is when I had multiple drivers in a row cancel on me before pickup. When I finally had enough I canceled the ride and then was charged a “cancelation charge” for canceling. The fact that I only canceled after multiple drivers canceled on ME leaving me waiting for 30 minutes was lost on Uber. Since then I’ve sent all my business elsewhere. Per the OP trying to get a human at Uber to apply basic logic to a situation is essentially impossible.

hericium 4y ago
> I had multiple drivers in a row cancel on me before pickup. When I finally had enough I canceled the ride and then was charged a “cancelation charge” for canceling. I've had the exact some scenario with Bolt.
Syzygies 4y ago
Your credit card company is the entity you can expect to apply basic logic. In the short term, that logic will be to refund your money to keep your annual spend, but not to bother Uber. In the long term, this could raise the fees Uber pays for credit card services. Long before Uber, a JAX airport auto rental was improperly tacking an $8 fee onto every "paid in full" Hotwire reservation. This can add up over a year. When challenged, they lied and claimed it was an upgrade. American Express of course made no effort to protest this, they just refunded my $8. Not very satisfying, but still my best course of action.
- Shaanie 4y ago
  A credit card chargeback should be used as the last resort, and for good reason: many service providers will permanently suspend your account if you do one. There's typically a thread or two per year where some poor sap gets double charged by Google or similar company, uses a chargeback and then gets their entire account suspended. Poof, all your mails are now permanently gone. So yeah, only do it if you're OK with never using Uber again.
4y ago

zoba 4y ago

This happened to me with Airbnb. Despite contacting friends who worked at the company to unban me, I always always re-banned. I resolved it by using a different email address. Something about my primary email was on Airbnb’s shit list and there was apparently no easy way to resolve it. Never had a single issue with the new email.

unsupp0rted 4y ago
The same thing happened to me with Tinder. I guess… because they would never tell me why I was banned, even though my profile is boring and tame and so are all my chats.

exhaze 4y ago

Former Uber engineer - had friend who got "randomly" banned in ~2016/17 and I investigated. Sadly, it's likely the same story as back then, and same story as you see with other large tech companies - false positive fraud detection algo. This doesn't help you much, but just wanted to try and help explain the "why".

smohnot 4y ago

This happened to me too. I opened a new account with a different email address, credit card and phone number (used google voice).

nomilk 4y ago

Could dual sim be an easy solution? (i.e. sign up to uber with a secondary phone number). I don't know if this would work. Quick explainer of dual sim on iPhone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lnEQLVOsH4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lnEQLVOsH4

988747 4y ago

It blocked me in 2018, because I went on extended business trip to US, and tried to convert my personal account to a business one (to get proper invoces for expensing). My activity became suspicious, and now Uber wants scan of my credit card and government-issued ID, which I'm not willing to give it.

distcs 4y ago

Slightly off-topic: Are there countries that have such good local public transit that I don't have to depend on Uber?

Freak_NL 4y ago
Lots. Large parts of Europe, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan looks manageable too, etc. It all depends on destination and area of course, but in countries with decent public transport any part where you can't get to by bus or train or ferry tends to have decent local taxi companies to fill in the gaps. I base my travel around public transport almost exclusively. I've never even used Uber or any other service like that. (And obviously, I don't need a car (or ride hailing service) living in a medium sized city in the Netherlands either.)

eloisius 4y ago

This keeps me awake at night. Where I live, Uber is the only ride service, but my account is in a sketchy limbo that is still working for now. Years ago I wanted to drive for one night to try it out, so now my account is stuck as a “partner.” I can’t change my phone number or anything in the app because it tells me to go to the partner site. I can’t log into that for some reason, and I can’t reset my password because it claims my personal info (SSN) is already in use by another account. Of course support is robots that tell me to do the obvious. One day I’m sure my account is going to get roboflagged as an anomaly and I’ll be screwed on the side of the road.

hedora 4y ago
Public service announcement: SSN's are not unique, and were never intended to be. They are assigned using an allocation scheme that ensures people of similar age will not have the same SSN, and that allows localities to independently allocate them at birth without creating collisions.
- PopAlongKid 4y ago
  I don't think any of your claims are true. https://www.ssa.gov/employer/randomization.html https://www.ssa.gov/employer/randomization.html
  - rosnd 4y ago
    SSNs are not unique for a whole lot of reasons. https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/odds-someone-else-has-your-ssn-one-7-6c10406347 https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/odds-someone-else-has-your...
    - PopAlongKid 4y ago
      OK, so the one claim about not being unique has some truth to it. Yes, they are mis-used (either mistakenly or maliciously) to some extent by people they were not assigned to, but they were never intended to be non-unique, which was the primary claim I was responding to, along with the other ones. [edit] There is a related claim (not made above) that is correct, which is SSNs were never intended to be a secret.

mabbo 4y ago

I wonder if this is a symptom of there being too few competitors in most markets. In a very competitive market, having a long-term customer is an incredibly valuable thing. You should want to invest heavily in customer support so that you can avoid losing customers. But in a market with only two competitors (Lyft and Uber) there isn't a need. There's only one other competitor, so how much do you really need to invest in customer support? Spend that money on marketing to steal customers from the other competitor- you'll get a better ROI in terms of number of customers. The same applies to Google of course. What are you going to do, use Bing? Switch your gmail account to someone else? I guess you could get an iPhone instead of Android? As a counter-example, Amazon had to win customer trust early on because nobody trusted online shopping. They invested heavily in customer support. They kept investing in it, as a means to keep customers from switching to new competitors. For a long time, that helped them stay on top. But in the end, we need more diverse markets with more competitors. And at this point, the government ought to be stepping in to make that happen.

dbfx 4y ago

The idea that this is normalized as the way a bank behaves is profoundly scary.

can16358p 4y ago

With all those rules around regulation and GDPR that hardly anyone actually benefits, why aren't there rules that prevent banning users from platforms without a good excuse?

Nextgrid 4y ago
GDPR is not enforced strongly enough to matter.

Badass_97 4y ago

They had even blocked my account and its pretty shit. They don't even give any reason.One of many reasons I vote for decentralization.

MichaelRazum 4y ago

I think the interesting question is, is uber aware of it? Like okay, that happens the false positive rate is under 0.001% percent and we try to improve. Maybe if we add this "edge case" the true positive rate would go worse. Then I can undestand it. On the other hand if they are not investigating and do not try to improve, then it is really bad.

drewg123 4y ago

My partner was "shadow banned" from Uber for what we suspect was a payments related reason. No matter what card she put in Uber, she would see "payment declined", even when the card was well below the limit, and she would not see any attempted transaction on the bank website. Uber customer support was non-existent. She eventually got a new phone, made a new account, and gave them a CC number they'd never seen before. Things just magically started working.

flerchin 4y ago

Customer service costs scale linearly with the number of users. This is not a mode of business supported by tech-companies.

juancn 4y ago

I think we've reached the point where we need legislation to force companies to: - Clearly explain all bans and suspensions (which exact rule you broke, which evidence do they have, who made the call) - Provide a clear resolution/complain mechanism with escalation outside the company Apparently competition is not enough for this.

anon223345 4y ago

TBF Uber is now crap, I order UberXL and it was a run down, piece of shit 90s Ford Explorer with a broken shock absorber. Another Uber, the driver tried to convert me to some hardcore conspiracy shit. Uber is trash now, Lyft is slightly better, at least everytime I’ve taken Lyft the cars have been relatively nice. The only time I take them is with XLs to get to the airport though so I’m really only comparing the SUVs

cheri9 4y ago

[dead]

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

I might be wrong, but you will surely get their attention by having a lawyer writing them about your case. You might not solve anything, but at least someone in power will read about your case.