After a long night out, it is fairly typical that you and your friends won’t want to walk home—You’re tired, you might be a little drunk and you want to be safe. So what do you do? You call an Uber, the popular car service. But because of one women’s story, you may want to reconsider.
According to Meredith Mandel, a frequent Uber user, after a night out with her boyfriend and a friend she woke up the next morning and noticed two additional $200 cleaning fees on top of her $19 fare. But here’s the catch—She insists she never got sick or caused any damage to the car, according to Gothamist.com.
“Dinner literally lasted two and a half hours, and me and one other girl in the car had two really small glasses of wine,” she said. “My boyfriend had two beers. This is over two and a half hours, so we were basically sober by the end.” Mandel contacted customer support letting them know the problem and was told that Muhammad, the driver, said that Mandel and the two other passengers were drunk.
“At first I was trying to actually give them the benefit of a doubt, but I realized [it] because all of the money goes to the drivers,” Mandel said. According to the Uber website, cleaning fee’s for cosmetic or physical damage to the interior or exterior of the car can be anymore between $50 and $200. But then she realized it was a scam. Firstly because she was not drunk for the ride at all, but also because there were pictures of the “evidence” and the bright yellow color didn’t seem to match up at all to what she actually ate for dinner. Plus, the photos seemed to show vom on plastic surfaces like the dashboard and floor mats, which definitely wouldn’t cost $200 to clean.
Uber has since responded to the incident, according to Gothamist, saying, “If a rider is wrongly charged a cleaning fee, we investigate the circumstances and then provide a refund, which is what happened in this case.”
Mandel has been refunded for all charges since contacting customer service after giving all the details of that night to them but it should be known that this is not the first incidence of Uber drivers trying to scam their customers into extremely high fees.