Scammers target Bend Uber drivers in phishing scam

Scammers are going after Uber drivers in Bend, trying to gain access to their personal information.

Nelson Reyes said he was driving for Uber Sunday when he got a call from someone who identified himself as being from the ride-sharing company.

The caller said Reyes was being rerouted, then asked him to pull over and disconnect from his Uber app.
Reyes did that — but then the caller asked him to send his email address and password. The caller said if he failed to do so, Reyes would be suspended from driving for Uber and would need to have an appointment with regional officials.

“So I was like, ‘OK, why don’t you go ahead and set me up with the appointment then? Because I don’t feel comfortable giving you my information,'” Reyes recalled Monday.

“They’re like, ‘Well if you don’t do this, we’re going to suspend your account until further notice.’ I was like, ‘OK suspend it — give me the appointment,'” he said.

“And at that point, they were just getting persistent. They were like, ‘No, just give us the information so we can figure out who you are right here right now, or we will suspend it,'” Reyes said.

Reyes said the caller finally got agitated, used vulgar language and hung up on him.

“It was just too weird, the way they were going about it. And once they started really getting persistent, I was like, ‘This isn’t right,'” Reyes said.

“If someone is trying to take your money you just earned, it’s kind of messed up,” Reyes added.

According to Uber, this is a familiar phishing scam. The company advises all their drivers to never give out personal information over the phone.

Officials with the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit based in San Diego, said they are also very familiar with the scam.

The center’s president, Eva Velasquez, said scammers will tug at your heartstrings to get to your wallet.

“A legitimate company, they’re not going to start getting angry with you and say you’re going to have all these consequence if you don’t do this right this second,” Velasquez said. “That’s a scammer technique to try to engage that emotional part of your brain, so you don’t make logical choices and you start to give away all your information. So that’s a big red flag.”

Velasquez said you should never give out personal information over the phone and you should always go to the original source first.

In a statement shared with NewsChannel 21, Uber said it routinely helps drivers reclaim funds lost to scams like this.