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

>At least 14,000 trips involved drivers who weren’t who the riders thought they were,

any idea what the source of this info is?

And not sure what the timeframe here is. Is it 14000 since Uber started operating in london?

Where I live people give their phones and unlock code to others to drive under their name. They usually do this for drivers who can't pass a background check or even don't have a driver's license, but still need money.

The legit driver almost always gets a cut for this, free money on your vacation days or while you're working other, better jobs.

IIRC you can complain (either on uber or uber eats) that the driver didn't look like their photo. It might be from that. Not sure how else they can get the info

Not sure, but as a passenger in London it's happened to a few times

Complaints are a possible source, but they also may have identified single accounts with multiple drivers (by reviewing driver profile pic uploads) and then counted all the trips for each.

The number comes from Cognizant who were hired to conduct an independent review [1]. They found that 43 drivers out of 45,000 drivers skirted Uber's identity checks committing identity fraud.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/78827b06-0f6a-11ea-a225-db2f231cf...

source seems to be TFL not uber and even then that would just be number of possible instances not actual instances reported in the article.

ok thank you.

I don't have FT subscription. But 43 out of 45k drivers seems like a pretty good number, certainly not a ban worthy number.

I've seen in Turkish forums people discussing driving Uber in the USA through proxy accounts because they cannot do it themselves legally on a tourist visa or because they were banned.

I would guess that if this is a widespread practice it is only a secret to the outsiders. Probably an investigation can find a way to frame this known secret in a way that is legally accepted in the court of law.

Thanks for posting the raw numbers. London is citing this 14,000 number as if its egregious, but my initial reaction was: "Out of how many total?" Based on the numbers you're posting Uber was literally 99.9% compliant. That's definitely not "unfit."

This is politics plain and simple. And not the first time Uber has had to play the game. This same thing played out in 2017. The courts will side with Uber.

Yes, you can tell that someone is trying to make it sound bad by using the inflated 'trips' figure rather than number of drivers. This is mostly the fall out of political pressure from black cab drivers and their associations.

I'm certainly not keen on Ubers business practices, it's lacklustre approach to safety and poor record when it comes to employment regulations. However I think acceptance that the taxi industry has been changed forever will come eventually, these luddite challenges will eventually be forgotten and we'll all move on with our lives.

If we're lucky Uber will crash and burn and someone will pickup the baton, ideally in a more fair and sustainable way.

This figure of 43 drivers seems to have been edited out of the article, any other source?

[edit] open access version of article: http://archive.is/mNxBo

And what is the number for regular cabs?

There are some other accusations as well and it actually says "at least 43" so that could be open ended. I guess they found 43 and weren't sure if there were others they hadn't found. But I'm just speculating.

You can read the article without a subscription if you google the URL and then click on it from the search results.

The number is actually quoted as "at least 43". I should have quoted more carefully. Sorry for that.

You can google the URL and then click on the link to get through the paywall.

> The number comes from Cognizant

I don't see that here http://archive.is/mNxBo

was it edited out after u read it?

I can't open your link for some reason. But it's all still there in the original FT article.

It is a bit unclear though which numbers and findings come from Cognizant and which are from the TfL investigation.

hah yea crazy that article seems to be the only source linking cognizant to those numbers.

Those numbers are repeated everywhere without any context or sourcing. Totally sounds like a smear job to me.

Having read it again, I now think the numbers are indeed from TfL and not from the more recent Cognizant review.