A day after a BuzzFeed investigation appeared to uncover thousands of Uber customer complaints flagged with the word "rape," the ride-hailing service claims that the actual number of sexual assault complaints it received is far lower.
In a letter to BuzzFeed, Uber executives explained that leaked screenshots of the company's ticket management system were misleading because of the search terms they depicted. They wrote that a "rape" query will return every instance of the letters "R A P E," such as a person's name (Don Draper, for example).
Instead of the nearly 6,000 tickets shown in the screenshots, there are only five tickets from December 2012 to August 2015 that allege an actual rape occurred, the executives wrote. There are 170 tickets with a legitimate claim of sexual assault, or one in every 3.3 million trips.
Still, Uber acknowledged that some cases of rape or other sexual misconduct could have been reported to the police and not submitted to its customer service representatives.
Indeed, there have been multiple news reports of sexual assault investigations in connection with ride-hailing services. Last year, police in Austin, Texas reported they were investigating seven sexual assault claims against Uber and Lyft drivers. Two Boston women sued Uber last October, claiming they were sexually assaulted by a driver.
In addition to sexual assault, unscrupulous Uber drivers have also been in the news recently for an alleged "fake barf" scam in which a customer was billed a fraudulent $200 cleaning fee.
Uber tacitly admitted to deficiencies in its driver screening process when it agreed to pay out $28.5 million to settle two class-action lawsuits that took issue with its "safe ride" fee. One of the suits complained that "Uber's background check procedures and safety measures are woefully inadequate and fall well short of what is required for other commercial providers of transportation."
BuzzFeed reported that after Uber learned of its investigation, the company began an internal probe to find customer service representatives who may have leaked the screenshots.