Cold sweats for Oliver Kaplan, a 22-year-old Englishman, who had ordered an Uber to meet friends in a bar after work, says an article in The Independent newspaper. Departing from Hyde to the east of Manchester, England, your 15-minute drive to Ashton-under-Lyne shouldn’t have cost you more than £11. But the day after his evening, the young man receives an email from the VTC app telling him that his bank account won’t allow him to pay for the previous day’s race.
An invoice of 40,000 euros
However, when placing the order, the app had indicated to the customer that their trip would be billed at the normal price, ie between £10 and £11. Oliver Kaplan even told the English newspaper ‘The Independent’ that everything seemed normal: “The driver arrived, I got in and he took me exactly to the place I wanted, like every time I ask for an Uber.”
In the end, it is an invoice of 35,427.97 pounds, or just over 40,000 euros, which was waiting for the customer when he woke up. First believing in a mistake or clumsiness after his drunken evening, Oliver Kaplan called Uber customer service to understand where this exorbitant price was coming from.
The address indicated a location in Australia
Customer service was initially surprised by the request, but quickly understood where the error in the amount was coming from. Indeed, the place of arrival of the race had been fixed… in Australia, a trip of approximately 22 hours by plane in normal times. “It seems that our system indicates a point of arrival in Australia and that is why the price of the race is very high. However, our engineers are fixing the issue,” Uber told the customer via text message.
A big scare for the young Englishman who can thank his meager bank account: “I didn’t have enough money to pay for the race. But if I had had this sum in my account, I would have had to fight to get my money back.” He could have brought me big financial trouble,” he told the Manchester Evening News.
After verification, Uber corrected its error and re-billed the customer for the trip, for a final amount of £10.73.
Source: BFM TV
