It’s not quite Halloween, but an eruption of creepy faces on driver profiles at Uber in China has spooked potential passengers and raised suspicions of an organised attempt to scam the car-booking app.
Some Uber users have booked cars only to be assigned drivers with distorted photos and scary faces, while their trips suddenly begin and end before a car has arrived. In other cases, “ghost” cars appear in the app but never arrive, resulting in false charges.
The incidents come at a time of transition for Uber, which merged its China operations with rival Didi Chuxing in August. The similarity of the “ghost driver” incidents in a number of different Chinese cities over the past month imply an organised attempt to exploit staffing gaps during the handover, experts said.