A better analogy than the pizza analogy might be a "customer" repeatedly buying clothes with the intent to wear and then return them. Despite the fact that there is a return policy in place, the fact that the customer never intended on keeping any of the clothes makes his behavior fraudulent.
Get a bunch of people to repeatedly queue up but when they get to the counter decide they don't want to order anything.
Just the sight of a long queue outside the door is going to put off legit customers
Clearly Uber are engaging in activities to disrupt and cause harm to the business of their competitor.
Legit customers can't book cars because they're busy and when they do the drivers might bail because they think its yet another fake order.
Screw Uber. Theyre not a tech start-up, they're an illegal car service masquerading as a tech company.
It's dickish, but no actual harm is done.
And if it cost $1 per cancelled pizza they would actually profit off of it.
In the case of a real restaurant, yes there is harm done. The cost of taking an order is not zero for people: it cost people time and real customers may not be served in time. Maybe not for this particular case with Gett since they're automated.
You could argue that there was no harm to Gett because of the cancellation fees, but that's only true if the cancellation fees are greater than the cost they incurred which may or may not be true.
Or at least intentional harm. Such as if they meant to cancel immediately but didn't.
Are you a lawyer familiar with fraud related laws in New York?
IANAL. However, in the UK I suspect it would hinge on whether you gained or whether there was harm. Fraud by false representation is - IRC - defined in those sorts of terms in the Fraud Act 2006.
Point being this stuff varies and doesn't necessarily align with what we might intuit it does.
How exactly is this not fraud?
Presumably so that the customer can contact the driver if they need to pass on instructions about a specific place to be picked up, etc.
Theoretically, if the company can get a bunch of phone #s, they could even completely anonymize it by assigning two temporary numbers (one to driver, one to passenger) and call-forwarding them for the duration of the trip. I havent' checked but I doubt anybody actually does this. And in the absence of this level of anonymity, I would at the very least expect a car service app to require you to place the call before giving you the phone # of the other person.
Actually, I think they use some sort of phone proxy service. I once looked at my driver's phone and he had a totally different number listed for me that I did not recognize (same area code though).
You wouldn't even need a bunch of phone numbers. Assuming caller ID works correctly, you can use that to decide where to route the call. Customer A is calling? Route to Driver X? Driver Y is calling? Route to Customer B.
I haven't seen an instance of caller ID being 'futzed' with in domestic calls from domestic mobile phone numbers, but I agree it could happen for people roaming internationally.
Not sure about this company, but for Uber the cancellation fee should only happen if you cancel after five minutes of scheduling a ride. I've seen Lyft and other rideshare companies have similar policies.