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Uber's Terrifying 'Ghost Drivers' Are Freaking Out Passengers in China (qz.com)
Several Chinese publications are reporting that "ghost drivers" are frightening Uber passengers into paying for trips they didn't take. Passengers in Tianjin, Qingdao, Chengdu, Beijing, Shanghai and Suzhou have been canceling Uber rides after seeing creepy driver profile pictures pop up in the app. Quartz reports: Passengers using the ride-hailing app in several Chinese cities have reported seeing their requests picked up by drivers with creepy profile photos of zombie faces. According to Chinese news site Sixth Tone, the point of these ghostly profiles is to scare passengers into canceling the trip, so they are fined for a few yuan (less than a dollar), which goes to the driver. Other passengers have reported seeing their rides accepted, but then their trips were "started" by the driver on the app before they even get to the car. These "ghost rides" last less than a minute, with the driver charging customers between 8 and 15 yuan (about 1 to 2 dollars) for a ride that never happened. Calls to the drivers in these cases are never picked up, according to The Paper, a state-owned media. Passengers can however eventually be reimbursed by Uber China if they lodge a complaint.
I thought one of the selling points of Uber was that customers could review the drivers, and so you knew in advance you were getting someone you could trust?
Scientists Discover That Horses Can Use Symbols To Talk To Us
OH MY GOD!~!
That's the last ride I take without an interpreter. What are those horses saying behind our backs ??
to the "ghost rides".
Modify the Uber app so that the rider has to confirm the start of the ride on their mobile device.
Reporting of "scary" profile pics should be simple as well - simple snapshot and forward - If proven - the driver takes a hit on their next 5 drives - say $1-2 per drive.
Problem solved.
Don't any decent people live over there?
No.
Or do all the decent ones simply say "screw this" and leave, because the Chinese people I meet locally are great people.
Yes.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
People find they can abuse a system for personal monetary gain, so they do.
There will be solutions to these existing abuses but I suspect that the drivers will be able to devise new ones faster than the Uber developers can mitigate against them.
I've used Uber 3 or 4 times in LA and always enjoyed it. The cars were nice. The drivers were nice. It was easier to arrange a ride then using a traditional taxi. The cost seemed comparable to a taxi cost.
Hey, I resent that "no." I have several Australian, American, German, Mexican, and Indian colleagues still working in China!
They sure are enterprising.
[I say this as someone who is Chinese; irony disclaimers apply]
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Article makes it sound like they are getting spooked because of monsters or something, but they are really just deciding they don't want to ride with a weirdo.
Uber and its peers remove significant friction from the standard cab experience: hail-by-app, track approach of car, fare negotiated with the dispatcher rather than driver, dispatcher oversight of route actually driven, cardless payment, driver reviews and performance management, dynamically sized pool of cars on the road. Each of these significantly improves the experience of hiring a car. On the flipside, These "ride hailing" companies ares monetizing the commercial use of public roadways without paying for it, and most drivers likely do not have insurance that covers their livery activities.
Yeah, it's not even news when people elsewhere are screwing each other to make a quick buck because it's that common place.
The only news I ever hear coming out of China is how everyone is screwing each other to make a quick buck. It's to the point where I make a point of avoiding any and all foodstuffs that originate in China cause I don't wanna be poisoned.
Don't any decent people live over there? Or do all the decent ones simply say "screw this" and leave, because the Chinese people I meet locally are great people.
They're great people especially to a Westerner because they come from a traditional society. Traditional societies value discipline and social graces. They very strongly frown on being self-centered, disruptive, and wanting to be the center of attention at all times. For example they tend to honor anyone who serves or waits on them, instead of thinking that such a person is beneath them as you often see Americans doing (ever work an entry-level job when you were younger? yeah...)
I haven't had much contact with Chinese people but I found the Japanese especially pleasant to work with (i.e. people who grew up in Japan - not people who just happen to be of Japanese ethnicity but have been immersed in American culture for generations). They're just so very civil and they really mean it - it's not some perfunctory show. A lot of things provincial Americans wouldn't notice or think twice about would be major faux pas in Japanese culture. When doing business they didn't generally look for ways to screw me over, gain an unfair advantage, or weasel out of an agreement the way many fellow Americans have attempted to do, though to be fair American management is generally run by sociopaths.
Don't any decent people live over there?
No.
Or do all the decent ones simply say "screw this" and leave, because the Chinese people I meet locally are great people.
Yes.
It's like that saying about corruption - everybody either wants less of it, or more opportunity to participate in it. Apply this to a totalitarian government that doesn't really even give lip-service to ideas like human rights. I guess that may not really narrow it down much, so I'll spell out that I'm talking about the government of China (this time). Now you have a situation where people who are decent and have a chance to do so will want to get out of there, rather than live that way. So you get a self-selected group of immigrants which helps produce what you have observed.
You don't think it would be the same here if we didn't have regulations on everything?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Traditional taxi drivers don't pay for the "commercial use" of public roadways either. Unless you mean that they pay off the local politicians to maintain their hold on the market?
The Japanese are not anything like Chinese. However the concept of "Japanese honor" is a myth perpetuated by too many movies. The Japanese raped and pillaged parts of Asia for centuries. Modern events like Pearl Harbor dispel that myth.
Robotic Uber cars will solve these problems
That's Iran.
Chinese screw other people, not goats.
I sure hope they will lodge the complaint up someone's ass.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Every day I shall drift farther away from the business plan of enabling ride sharing. Pray that I shall not drift from my business plan any further.
You can cancel a driver immediately without penalty. If you get a driver you've had before and didn't like or it's a driver with a POS car or a driver with a poor rating that's your opportunity to cancel.
The ghost drivers that plague me, in a non-US location, are drivers who are faking their locations so the appear to be close but actually aren't. I think they are being ghosts for a different reason, fear that the taxi mafia in this country in cooperation with the corrupt police harass Uber drivers and in some cases attack them. Every Uber driver insists that I ride up front and if pulled over pretend the driver is just my friend driving me around.
The taxi mafia here has good reason to fear Uber, it cuts into their revenue from ripping off people with everything from lying about the fare to pulling a counterfeit currency switcheroo when you pay.
Hmm... Are you from China or Korea? Those folks still, to this day, despise Japan, and for good reason. Pearl Harbour was nothing, compared to Nanking.
The "Japanese Honour" thing is 100% true. However, just like "Knight's Honour" in medieval Europe, it's a highly selective, caste-based system that can be pushed aside in many cases, and is based on a very harsh scale. The lower on the totem pole you live, the more crap you get.
The Japanese are not a touchy-feely people, but they are unbelievably polite; especially to folks they don't trust. Basically, if they trust you, they can be quite brusque or rude. I know this, because I've been dealing with them for decades.
Traditional taxi drivers don't pay for the "commercial use" of public roadways either.
well DUH they pay MORE for those medallions and they pay MORE for a commercial license and they pay MORE fees and tolls when they take passengers to the airport
so YES they ARE paying MORE for their "commercial use" of the public roadways.
my condolences go out to your family for your lost brain, I hope they find it
Pearl Harbor is the best you can come up with? What about Nanking?
If the communist Chinese government wasn't so corrupt and overall fucked-up, then maybe Chinese citizens wouldn't be so fucked-up and corrupt either, and you wouldn't have Chinese Uber drivers doing things to blatantly rip people off like this.
Sorry about that; I forgot my makeup and to shave.
Table-ized A.I.
Hahahahahahh.
It's hard to imagine how you could be more wrong. Chinese only have deep respect for family . They have zero respect for the community around them and they treat service workers like they are less than shit. Ask any stewardess / hostess in asia.
This could easily be a ploy to feed the rumormill to steer people away from Uber. The ride-sharing server market over there is extremely competitive.
Last I checked the driver profile pic is not something a driver can change, these are normally taken at the local uber "office" at the time of registration.
This just feels very fishy overall.
A global company spending billions of dollars to destroy the taxi industry, and so little to show for it. Goodbye, sharing economy! It was fun.
comparable? Every time I have used uber it has always been at least 40% cheaper than a cab and a much nicer experience.
Use your brain dude!
make 10 fake uber driver profiles with "scary" pictures, collect from all the fake rides you didnt do, count on cultural fear of ghosts to not get complaints.
China is full of entrepreneurs like that.
Another example: Shenzhen police started a program rewarding traffic violation recordings from dash cams with straight up cash (something like $5?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
there are tutorials on chinese social media how to make good money inciting other people to brake traffic laws.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Exactly. Nanking is another. Honor my ass. Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack. They have no honor.
I haven't had much contact with Chinese people but I found the Japanese especially pleasant to work with...
So why did you comment when you admit you were completely unqualified to?
Based on the title I thought this article was going to be about self-driving cars and people freaking out when their Uber pulls up without a driver.
Driver ate my brain, cannot recommend.
You are vastly generalizing Asians, it seems. The Japanese are alright, nowadays. The Chinese are the fucking scum of the earth.
Uber will be lapping this shit up - they love the de-regulated environment.
Have goats?
That happens only in Charlotte and other BLM places.
Japanese honor is real, although not universally applied. The last war basically run by samurai, the Russo-Japanese war, was fought very honorably. Inside the Japanese caste system, honor in wartime is pretty much limited to warriors, and arming the lower classes has typically led to atrocities. I hope they've changed that.
Japan did not rape and pillage any part of Asia except Japan for centuries, although you could argue decades in the case of Korea and Okinawa (and while Japanese treatment of them wasn't good, I don't know if it warrants the "rape and pillage" descriptor). Japan was very isolationist until the US and Russia opened up commerce by force in the mid-1800s, and it hasn't been "centuries" since then.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I learned that Samurais were basically taught to transition the unsheathing of their swords directly into a slashing attack. For some reason, they saw that as honorable.
I found that it helped me understand Pearl Harbor from the JP view.
--
"Know your enemy" - Homer
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain