During five years, 8,000 rides and 1,000 food deliveries, rideshare driver Lenny Sanchez says he lost track of the number of times scammers tried to steal his earnings.
Con artists claiming to be from Uber or Lyft frequently pinged his phone, offering special bonuses or VIP jobs.
Their goal: to access his account login and reroute his pay to their bank accounts.
Sanchez says he never fell for the scams, but he knows many drivers who do.
“If you’re a gig worker in Chicago for longer than a month, you’ve definitely run into a scam artist,” says Sanchez, who left full-time rideshare driving in March 2020 and is now director of the Independent Drivers Guild of Illinois.
In another scam, real-life passengers will pretend their phone died and ask the driver to use theirs. Then they access the driver’s rideshare account and switch the banking info to their own — “robbing them of their earnings from the back seat,” Sanchez says.
Steve Bernas, president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau of Chicago and Northern Illinois, says he’s seen an uptick in all sorts of scams targeting gig workers reported to the BBB Scam Tracker since people lost full-time jobs in the pandemic or began working from home.
Workers who offer rides, deliver groceries, pet-sit or perform other tasks on apps are being targeted by old scams…
