Customer Claims Uber Driver Staged Vomit Scene To Collect Bogus $200 Cleaning Charge

If you own a car that you use to drive strangers around in, it’s a nasty, expensive surprise when one of your passengers vomits up their dinner/night on the town in your car. But one Uber customer says she was hit with a $200 fine for a phantom puking session that never happened while she and her friends were in the car. Instead, she claims the driver faked the whole thing just to collect the dough.

A New York City woman who says she used to use Uber often is now swearing off the service forever, claiming that her driver accused her of barfing in his car to collect a $200 cleaning fee, reports Gothamist. He even backed it up with photos of the alleged upchuck, which the customer says were faked.

After taking an Uber home with a boyfriend and a friend one night, arriving home around 1:30 in the morning, she woke up the next day to find a $200 cleaning fee added to her $19 fare in her Paypal account, with no explanation.

When she took her issue to customer service, reps said things like her driver recalled her party being drunk, and told her that “the cleaning fee goes 100% to your driver.”

This made her take pause and wonder if she was being scammed — after all, it seemed very convenient that the fee goes entirely to the driver.

That scammy feeling intensified when she saw the photos of the alleged pukey car a rep shared with her: for one thing, she and the other passengers were confined to the back seat, and the photos showed vomit on the front passenger’s side dashboard. That, and all the puke was conveniently confined to easily cleaned surfaces. The color was off, too: the substances in the pics was yellowish, while she says she and her friends ate very dark food that night.

“It just doesn’t line up,” she told Gothamist.

Finally, Uber customer service wrote to apologize for the overcharge, and said she’d be refunded within 1-3 days. He also promised to follow up with the driver and “make sure to take appropriate actions.”

Gothamist received a statement from Uber, with a spokesman confirming that if a passenger is wrongly charged a cleaning fee, the company will investigate and then provide a refund.

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist