A Victoria resident is raising concerns about potentially fraudulent restaurants on food-delivery services after waiting hours for his online order — only for the restaurant to take his money and never deliver his meal.
Tom Power used Uber Eats earlier this week to place an order with Dushka Burger, which the app stated was located at 580 Yates St. in the city’s downtown area.
After three hours and many unanswered messages to the restaurant — including calls to the burger shop’s listed phone number that connected to a liquor store and Uber Eats’ support telling him to wait — the app notified him that his order had been delivered.
But Power said it never arrived.
“I received no notification, no call to my door, nothing like that,” Power said. “The [Uber Eats] support is all automatic; there is no option to just talk to someone.”
CBC News has since learned that there is no Dushka Burger restaurant at 580 Yates St. and, after contacting Uber Eats, which said it discovered fraudulent activity, the food-delivery service closed Dushka Burger’s account on the app.
When CBC began looking into other potentially suspicious accounts in the area, it found another listed at an address nearby, also on Yates Street. Uber Eats subsequently closed that account, too.
Power is now warning other food-delivery app users to take extra care when ordering and look out for red flags such as low ratings.
Power says he tried to open a support ticket with Uber Eats customer support when his order kept being delayed, but he says the app was urging him to contact Dushka Burger directly for his order and keep waiting.
“[Uber Eats] should just call the restaurant to make sure it exists or see how the customer experience would be,” Power said. “If you are telling a customer to call the restaurant to deal with your issue, what does that experience look like?
“Why would Uber Eats tell me to do that if they haven’t done it themselves?”
CBC News asked Uber Eats what its vetting process is for allowing restaurants to join the app and what consideration goes into allowing restaurants to have store staff deliver orders themselves.
“There are several requirements for a restaurant to be listed on the Uber Eats platform, including providing a business licence, bank account information, and store details,” Rang said. “Our controls help verify that all restaurants meet our requirements to minimize fraudulent activity. However, there are still instances of bad actors.”
Not an isolated incident
The CBC News investigation found Holmes Burgers, located at 560 Yates St in Victoria just down the road from Dushka Burger, is the location of Adventure Clothing. Holmes Burgers did not have any reviews on Uber Eats, and its menu contained multiple spelling mistakes.
CBC News reached out to Uber Eats about this establishment. The food-delivery service says it determined fraudulent activity and closed the Holmes Burgers account on its app.
“The [Holmes Burger] account was set up earlier this week and deactivated a couple of days later,” said Keerthana Rang, Uber Eats’ corporate communications lead. “We are running a scan for fraudulent activity and this would have been caught in that.”
CBC News asked Uber Eats about the scope of the scan it is conducting but has yet to hear back.
How to avoid this situation
Simone Lis, the CEO and president of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) serving mainland British Columbia and the Yukon, says there are a few things customers can do before ordering from a food-delivery app.
“You want to do your research on the business you are thinking of ordering from,” Lis said. “Ideally, you are ordering from companies you have bought from before.”
Lis says you can research other customers’ feedback to see what their experience was like. But she says to be cautious of fake reviews. She says to be wary of glowing reviews on a website posted all at once.
“You can also do reverse searches of images to see if they are stock photos or if they are real photos,” Lis said. “That might be a good way to see if the restaurant you are dealing with is legitimate.”
Lis says she has not heard a lot of experiences of people ordering from fraudulent restaurants on food-delivery apps but says fake websites, phishing scams, and online types of transactions are a common area of scams.
“Online purchase scams were the fifth riskiest scam on our BBB risk report and account for a third of all scams reported to the BBB,” Lis said. “It is easy to create a fake business and try to do transactions through that business online.”
If someone feels they were defrauded on a food-delivery app, Lis says to notify the app to try to get a refund. She also encourages sharing the experience online.
“When you are dealing with a third party — especially if it’s online — we encourage you to use a credit card compared to other payment methods,” Lis said. “If you don’t get what you are looking for, you can do a chargeback for services not rendered.”
Power says he reached out to Uber Eats’ support after getting his invoice for the meal to try to get his money back. He received a refund of $27.95 — the cost of the meal — but not the $5.84 he left as a tip.
