![]() IT worker Angie Bird apparently took a few rides around the Mexican city of Guadalajara. When she checked in the morning she realised her account had been hacked. Motherboard said it had found evidence of people selling “hacked” Uber accounts in quantities of 20 for $16.50, 50 for $32, or 100 for $54.īird, who works in IT and describes herself as an Uber fan, told Guardian Money how one evening earlier this month she took an Uber cab home, and then at 3am the next morning she received a couple of messages in Spanish which appeared to be saying “good evening” and asking where she was. In April 2015 tech news website Motherboard reported that active Uber account details had been found for sale on the “dark web”, a collection of thousands of websites that use anonymity tools to hide their internet provider address to enable them to carry out criminal activity. The company said it had investigated and “found no evidence of a breach at Uber”, adding: “Anyone who is charged for a trip they didn’t book or take will get a refund.” A number of people had reported that their accounts had been hacked, including TV presenter Anthea Turner who tweeted to Uber: “Account has been hacked nothing to HELP me on website this is ridiculous”. In May last year the Guardian reported that US authorities were looking into how British users of the service had been charged for “phantom trips”. Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Imagesīird, Cookney and Gallagher are certainly not the first people to be charged for Uber journeys they didn’t book or make, but what is alarming is that this problem appears to be ongoing. The TV presenter Anthea Turner is among those whose Uber accounts have been hacked. That is what happened to Neil Gallagher, who last month found three unauthorised transactions relating to Uber on his credit card statement. It has also emerged that it is possible to be billed for other people’s Uber trips even if you have never signed up for the on-demand ride-hailing service. One, costing $198 (£140), involved an epic 95-minute, 24-mile circuit of Manhattan island that ended up almost exactly where it started. Once she had got over the shock of being billed hundreds of dollars for journeys she hadn’t made, what struck her was that some looked like trips that no one in their right mind would make. Meanwhile, Londoner Franki Cookney was in Australia when she discovered she had been charged around $600 (£420) for three Uber cab rides in New York. The receipts for the journeys make for odd reading: in one case, in Guadalajara, someone took a cab driven by “Jose Antonio” to an address just 790 metres away, and then 50 minutes later they hailed an Uber cab driven by “Gustavo” to take them back to where they started.
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