Last year — on December 6, to be exact — I arrived home after a longer than usual work day with a craving for comfort food. For me, that’s BBQ chicken wings. And I was not going to get off my couch to get those wings. No, sirree Bob, Uber Eats would come to my lazy mmmhmm rescue.
Now, since this story is about a scammer, let’s just acknowledge up front that chicken wings themselves are a scam. How in the heck did the food industry manage to take the scrawniest, boniest, least meat-heavy part of the chicken and convince us it is a delicacy?
But kudos, food industry, ‘cause the scam has worked on millions of football fans across the U.S., and me too. I picked up my phone and started scrolling the Uber Eats app.
I stumble on a scammer
Chicken wings are ridiculously expensive. But pretty quickly I came upon “BT Wings,” a restaurant with very professional photos of all their food, and today — hurrah — they were offering a two-for-one special on wings. Yes! I placed an order around 7:30 p.m. And waited. And waited.
The app told me that BT Wings was using its own employees to deliver the food and not an Uber Eats contractor. After about 50 minutes, I started to get very hungry, and displeased by the long wait; the medical term for this condition is “hangry.” The app said to call the restaurant directly if there are problems. But the phone number — a non-local number, oddly — just played a little hold music and then hung up on me. I called a few more times over the next hour but no one ever picked up. It just played the hold music and then hung up.
At 10:40 p.m. the app told me — LIED to me — that the food had been delivered. No, it had NOT. And that’s when I got suspicious. Could it be….?
My investigation begins: Phase 1
I had thought it strange that the phone number for “BT Wings” was an (810) area code; in Ann Arbor, the area code is (734). That was the first clue, right there. Then I searched the Internet for “BT Wings,” and nothing came up. Like, nothing. The restaurant had no online presence at all except on the Uber Eats platform. That was really suspicious. I searched the address listed on the app, and found that it was actually a Chipotle restaurant’s address.
Finally, I saw that 86 people had ordered from BT Wings, and every single person had given them a “1” rating — the lowest rating.
”This so-called restaurant is a scam!” I thought to myself while eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “I will let Uber Eats know!” I said to myself, as I went back on the platform to tell them and also demand my money back.
This turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be.
In order to get your money back from Uber Eats, you have to communicate with the bots. Uber Eats does not make this easy. The company does not appear to have a single human being in customer service. I finally found a place on the app that seemed to allow a customer to claim that their food did not arrive….but the bot in charge was not user-friendly. In fact, if I may be permitted to anthropomorphize, this GetYerMoneyBack Bot is the robot equivalent of a 1970’s cigarette-chain-smoking, "mmhmm"-you boss, whatcha gonna do, fire me, DMV customer service clerk two weeks away from retirement. It did not send me anything to indicate that my refund claim was processed; it did NOT want to hear about a scammer! “I’m sorry, Tracy…… I’m afraid I can’t do that,” I imagined it saying in HAL’s voice.
So I also dm’d Uber Eats on X, and got an email back from them, and responded to the email, and went through the whole process again just to be sure. It took about an hour.
I knew at this point I wanted more than just my money back. After all, 86 people had been scammed and I bet some of them gave up trying to get their money back, and the longer this scammer was on the app, the more people it would steal from. “Why hasn’t Uber Eats shut them down?” I accusingly wondered. “This. Injustice. Shall. Not. Stand.”
Investigation: Phase 2
I wanted to be absolutely sure of my facts — so I ordered the same food from BT Wings a few days later; yes, I am crazy; I had the same thing happen; and I went through the hour-long process of getting my money back.
Then, I drove to the Chipotle store, and spoke to Aurey Hosman, the nicest, smartest store manager in all of store manager history (disclaimer: my opinion.) When I explained the situation, he exclaimed, “So that’s what’s going on!” He said sometimes people walk into this Mexican fast food restaurant to get wings. And he couldn’t understand why, until I showed up. He promised to notify Chipotle headquarters.
Chipotle sent me a very nice email that day apologizing for the situation even though it was not their fault in any way and thanking me for noticing Mr. Hosman’s superbness.
Investigation: Phase 3
I really wanted to speak with a human being at Uber Eats and explain all this. But I could not find a functional phone number for Uber Eats anywhere — not on the web, nor on the California Secretary of State’s listing (San Francisco being where Uber Eats has its headquarters). I couldn’t find a working number even in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Hmm.
So I had to content myself with emailing press@ubereats.com
The next day, a human being responded to me over email. It was nice. I like human beings. This human being, Meghan Casserly (Head of Delivery Communications at Uber Eats, according to the Internet) asked me to explain what I had discovered and she said she’d look into it and get back to me. She said the holidays might slow things down, but in the meantime, BT Wings, which had now scammed 96 people, would be removed from the app.
I asked for an interview by January 3. Weeellll. I work in the news business, so when that date arrived and I hadn’t heard from Ms. Casserly, I was not particularly surprised, so I gave her an email nudge. (She does not include a phone number in her email communications and I gotta wonder, do they not have phone numbers at Uber Eats? Maybe they use intercoms in-house and borrow the phone at the local Starbucks for outgoing?) She asked for another week to look into it again with “the local team.”
I also filled out a scam report on the FBI and FTC’s websites.
This was before Elon Musk’s DOGE apparently decided the U.S. needs to significantly cut federal employment levels so I am highly doubtful human eyes will ever see these reports.
And really, I just wanted to give an FBI and FTC agent a little chuckle as they figuratively crumpled up the complaint and pitched it into the circular file and turned their attention to bigger scams. Puella sperare potest, as they said in ancient Rome.
The Final Results of The Great (yes, at this point it is The Great) Uber Eats Chicken Wings Investigation
Two days later, Ms. Casserly wrote to me and said the team had “investigated and taken action in this case.” She said she could not approve an interview, because “as fraud is an ever-evolving issue that we fight on an ongoing basis, we have to be really sensitive about how much we speak to publicly” but offered me this statement:
This experience is deeply frustrating, and doesn’t live up to our standards. We've taken steps to make it right, including removing the restaurant from the Uber Eats platform, and refunding any impacted consumers. While fraud is an incredibly complex, ever-changing issue that affects many industries, this incident is an opportunity to continue to strengthen our systems, policies, practices and technology to detect fraudulent activity on the Uber platform. We’ll do so here, and are committed to ongoing improvement on our processes so that we can provide the best possible experience for our users.”
Okay, problem solved? It sounded to me like Uber Eats had tightened up its scam blocking policies, or at the minimum gave those bots a very stern talking-to and fussed with their algorithmic innards to give them the ability to detect scams.
But not getting an interview frustrates reporters, so for kicks I contacted DoorDash, Uber Eats’ larger-by-far competitor, and asked them how they keep scammers off their platform.
Scammers-Be-Gone at DoorDash
Via email, Anneka Patel, on the Merchant Communications team, said they could not offer me a phone interview but if I sent questions they’d answer by my deadline, which they did.
According to a DoorDash spokesperson, restaurants have to provide tax ID (EIN), basic information on their business (business name, location, owner name, etc.), and additional information to comply with local requirements. DoorDash checks tax information to validate a business is real, then if there are further questions about a restaurant’s legitimacy, the company will also request a personal ID and additional business documentation, to validate it against.
The company also, said the spokesperson, continuously monitors order quality across its platform and “proactively reaches out to merchants with lower than expected ratings and quality metrics to provide guidance and support to improve their operational quality, or risk deactivation from the platform.” (I just bet that not delivering any food to the customers would get a swift kick off the platform.)
Finally, this: “We understand that some issues require human intervention. Therefore, the chatbot provides a seamless transition to live support.” A choir of angels sang. (In my head, and yes, my employer is getting me help.) Just imagine. You can talk to a real, live, breathing human being and inform them of your latest conspiracy theory and whatnot. But don’t do that, if you use DoorDash. Humans are a rare and quickly vanishing species in customer service and should be treated with the dignity and respect they deserve.
The Kicker
I really thought Uber Eats had taken care of the problem. That they had done something.
Oh, gullible sweet summer child me. I went on the Uber Eats platform last night after checking the fridge and seeing there was cheese and only cheese…..
And who do you think popped right up? You guessed it.
BT Wings. They were back. Now with 110 one-star reviews from people who did not get their wings.
Justice laughed.
