I don’t even use Uber. And I can find no means of contacting any customer service support to do anything about it. Should I just report it to my bank as fraud? Or has anyone else dealt with this successfully?
Call your bank and report the fraudulent charge.
I hope it wasn’t something unintentional like accidentally accepting a hidden opt-out buried in the stupid license acceptance dialogue of software you installed lately, although I would marvel at how they would have gotten your CC number.
More likely a conventional CC compromise by some thieving garbage someplace.
This.
I had a couple of Lyft charges like that a few months back- I noticed them, but my bank literally called me before I could call them and ask- they were definitely fraudulent, and I got my money restored by the bank. Presumably they worked it out with Lyft from there.
I had an email from Lyft saying that someone had tried to use my email as a user id for a non-existent Lyft account, so there’s probably some ne’r-do-wells nibbling around the edges of Lyft.
I blasted them on twitter with hashtags #uberpassfraud and #uberfraud and after it got shared a few times I received an email telling me a refund had been issued
Okay, but again, your bank is where you need to address this. If your number has been stolen, you don’t address it with each business individually. It’s not Uber’s fault if someone used your card number fraudulently.
Amex called me for the same reason. I’m in Wisconsin and there was a $600 lyft/uber charge from New York on my card. I confirmed it wasn’t mine and they removed it before I even knew about it. At first I felt kinda bad that a driver may have lost a $600 fare, but it seems more likely that a driver set up a fake rider account with my number and pretended to pick them up and drive them somewhere.
Just call the bank and tell them it’s a fraudulent charge. I doubt they’ll put up any resistance at all about it. The only way they will is if Uber can prove that you were the one that incurred that charge.
For Uber though? Even so, if OP disputes the charge and it is something they legitimately but unintentionally signed up for, that’ll be revealed during the chargeback process.
Uber may have refunded the transaction for PR purposes but that doesn’t address the fact your debit card has been compromised. Uber, as a company, didn’t defraud you. Someone, maybe more than one, still has access to your compromised debit card detals. You still need to contact your bank and have your card replaced.
Like the other’s said, you can be almost 100% certain this isn’t Uber’s fault. It’s no different than getting mad at Target because I stole your debit card and used it there. Uber had no real way to know that it wasn’t you punching in the card number.
Call your bank and tell them what happened. They’ll reverse the charge, cancel your card and send you a new one. If you call early enough in the day and use whatever magic words the CSR wants to hear, you may be able to get them to overnight it to you.
FYI, that was part of my bank’s fraud handling- they restored my money AND sent me a new debit card.
Wells Fargo, in case you might have been wondering.
Someone is actually organizing a class action lawsuit, so I’m not the only one who experienced this
Not necessarily. It’s partly down to the merchant to do adequate security checks for online transactions.
I am not sure what you mean by this. Unfortunately, credit card fraud is an ongoing problem that affects a lot of people in total.
What I mean by this is there are a lot of people with the same surprise on their statement, and there seems to be some suggestion that it’s a result of overly aggressive marketing on Uber’s part, like an opt out rather than opt in on some kind of delivery service description.
Got a link? I still have no idea what you think Uber did wrong.
I’m confused how Uber could have issued you a refund if you don’t have an account with them.
You have to keep in mind the merchant doesn’t make the decision. If you buy something on my website I have nothing to do with the transaction. The website simply alerts me that a sale was made and the money is being deposited into my account. There’s not really anything for me to check. Similarly, in a card present situation, the card is swiped and the machine either says ‘accepted’ or ‘declined’ there’s no ‘we’re not sure, use your best judgement’ option.
If someone calls me with a credit card number, expiration date, security code and zip code and my machine says everything is good to go, how could I know the card is stolen?
Similarly, if someone is standing in front of me swipes their own card and the machine says ‘approved’, there’s no reason for me to suspect it’s not their card.
Different merchants DO have different security checks in place, though I don’t know what they all are. When my credit card was compromised a couple years back, I spotted it because there was a charge for a restaurant in New York - and I had not been to NYC in quite a while at that point. When I called the bank, they verified a bunch of recent transactions with me (the fraudulent ones were the restaurant, a couple gasoline charges, a parking meter in NY, and some vending machines), AND also told me that someone had attempted to use the card at a Red Lobster but it was declined.
No idea why the Red Lobster was declined - they did not tell me what that was about. All the transactions in this case were in-person versus online. And the decisions here would be made by the merchant’s CC servicer, I imagine, vs the merchant’s own internal policies, though the merchant might also have their own fraud department.
As a side note: tales of debit card compromise are why we don’t use our debit card for purchases. The protections are stronger for credit card fraud - and if your checking account has been hammered by fraudulent charges, you’re out that cash until it’s resolved, meaning you might have trouble paying the mortgage, buying groceries etc.
I can’t tell if I’ve had enough coffee to tell this story well, but …
I used to work for an e-commerce company. In my purview was Fraud – minimizing it, crafting policies to deal with it, collaborating with banks and credit card companies.
I brought to the Big Bosses’ attention an assessment that our website functionality was too permissive, making it easy for thieves to bang way too many credit card #'s against our site in order to validate them (for purchases on our site and elsewhere).
The Biggest Boss said that “If a credit card holder (ie, individual) isn’t adequately checking their monthly statement for erroneous charges, it isn’t our fault. It isn’t fraud.”
He was reluctant to put IT resources into a good defense.
I strenuously recommended he reconsider. Nope.
Then came the holiday season, when a huge % of retail’s revenue and profits are made. IT had us in “code freeze,” meaning: the site is solid. No further changes will be made until after the holiday.
And then I got a phone call from a Sr. VP at one of the country’s largest banks: your company is not doing enough to minimize fraudulent use against our cardholders. We are not going to allow our cards – valid or not – to be used with your company until further notice.
The big credit cards, from the big banks, represent a HUGE hammer.
We had to break the seal on the website, and scramble to enact new policies and craft the programming to support them … along with the obvious QA to ensure it worked … all during the dramatic seasonal sales increases.
Yes. Companies should be good corporate citizens and do their part to stem fraud. They should not see it as a profit center. They shouldn’t do this only when a gun is held to their heads.