This Week In Rideshare: Amazon, BlackWolf, and Fraud.
Workers get injured, an app arms drivers, and the queen of rideshare mafia. LegalRideshare breaks it down.
HALF OF ALL AMAZON WORKERS GET INJURED
Amazon Prime Day Sales offer a lot more than discounts. Scripps News reported:
Nearly half of Amazon’s warehouse workers are injured during its Prime Day savings event, a Senate committee’s investigation found.
On Monday, one day before this year’s two-day sale began on July 16, the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, published a report claiming the company’s warehouses are “especially unsafe” during the event and that “the company knows it."
The report states Amazon’s total injury rate — which includes those the company isn’t required to disclose to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — during its 2019 Prime Day event was “just under” 45 injuries per 100 workers, according to Amazon’s internal data. And when counting only those that are required to be disclosed to OSHA, the rate was more than 10 injuries per 100 workers, which is more than twice the industry average, the report states.
These injuries include everything from bruises and superficial cuts to torn rotator cuffs and concussions, the latter of which Sanders alleged is more often underreported. He also claims Amazon’s history of underrecording serious injuries means the true number sustained on the job is likely higher.
BLACKWOLF APP ARMS DRIVERS
A new app aims to arm drivers. Chicago Business reported:
The BlackWolf app launched in Atlanta in 2023 with the stated goal of making ride-hailing safer. Not only are drivers armed, they are also all former military, police or private security with at least four years of protective experience.
Founder Kerry KingBrown said the guns are meant to emit the perception of safety, but drivers’ backgrounds in those protective professions are what should give passengers peace of mind.
BlackWolf recently applied for an operating license from Chicago’s Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection, which rideshare firms must be granted before launching in the city. The BACP told Crain’s the BlackWolf application did not comply with its instructions and legal requirements, and the department had notified the company it needed to be corrected.
QUEEN OF THE RIDESHARE MAFIA
One woman was responsible for creating thousands of fake driver accounts. Wired reported:
Over the next few weeks, she would click through the driver onboarding process on both Uber and Lyft, reading over the steps to create her own account, mulling the risk. Finally, lying in bed on Christmas night, the first one she’d spent without her family, it was time: She opened her phone and scrolled to the blonde woman’s license. Barbosa uploaded the license to the Uber app. She used the woman’s name but her own insurance and registration. She entered her own iCloud email and phone number and set her own picture — brown hair, brown eyes — on the driver profile. She made up a Social Security number, submitted the application, and went to sleep.
The next day, Uber approved the account. Like that, Barbosa was in business for herself.
The government said she pushed out some 2,000 accounts, using hundreds of driver’s licenses, and profited more than $780,000. Barbosa says about half of that was her actual take. The rest she either split with her business partners or sent along to the immigrants who didn’t have their own bank accounts and used hers. (The government conceded in court filings that Barbosa did let other people use her bank account.)
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