Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing

"Only in the last few months it has been established that 14,000 Uber journeys have involved fraudulent drivers uploading their photos to other driver accounts - with passengers' safety potentially put at risk getting into cars with unlicensed and suspended drivers."

This seems, from a technical perspective, an easy problem to solve with the resources of a public company.

Is it the desperation of people who need the money so badly they will constantly cheat the system? Can you design for that?

How do you stop one person signing up, doing the whole verification process correctly and then someone else using the app/driving the car? The only safeguard that springs to mind is providing a photo of the driver to the user, but that's already implemented.

You could also do spot checks (no idea if they do or not), but that's not going to eliminate the problem just reduce it.