Shady Company Employs Shady Investigators
Uber, a company known for employing intimidation tactics and blatantly ignoring laws it finds inconvenient, now stands accused of hiring an investigator who employed intimidation and lawbreaking in his work.
As Buzzfeed reports:
Morgan Richardson, a former Uber worker in Portland, Oregon, alleges that Uber’s legal and security and law enforcement director, Craig Clark, contacted her on March 4 in response to a BuzzFeed News article about leaked internal data regarding rape and sexual assault. According to Richardson’s attorney, Clark “asked her a series of questions” and “began to accuse her of taking certain screenshots and giving them to the media.” . . .
According to the cease and desist letter, on March 25 at around 7:30am “a male individual showed up at Richardson’s apartment and began banging on the door.” After five minutes of continued knocking, Richardson “saw him opening her mailbox and looking inside it.” The letter alleges the unidentified man “place[ed] his ear against her door apparently to hear her inside.”
When Richardson opened the door, it alleges, the male “identified himself as an Uber investigator from California” but did not provide any identification.
The man in question then entered Richardson’s apartment without her permission and used phrases that Fat Tony would feel were a bit too on the nose.
From the cease-and-desist letter:
The Uber investigator, sent from California to intimidate Ms. Richardson, put his briefcase on the sofa and took out a legal pad for Ms. Richardson to write on. She wrote that she did not want to talk to him and then he said, “You know what this is about don’t you?” She replied that she thought she did. At one point, he asked ominously, “Do I scare you?” Then he said to her, “THIS IS NOT GOING TO GO AWAY YOU KNOW.”
All joking aside, hiring thugs to intimidate problematic individuals seems sadly shocking yet in-character for Uber. This entire scenario is the result of Buzzfeed reporting on Uber’s sex assault complaints being higher than the number claimed by Uber, according to leaked documents. These are serious allegations – ones that, based on its history of taking things seriously, Uber is no doubt trying to ignore for as long as possible.
(Another must read: This is Uber’s playbook for sabotaging Lyft.)
In lighter news, you can now view your Uber rider rating right from the app instead of waiting for customer service reps to manually respond. My score is a perfect 5.0/5.0.
