Black Market Groups on Facebook Sell Thousands of Fake Uber, Delivery Accounts

The other day, I logged into Facebook and searched for ride-share and delivery accounts for sale. As the cartoon dog Scooby Doo likes to say: “Ruh-roh.”

A report out this week from the non-profit watchdog Tech Transparency Project identified 80 Facebook groups with more than 800,000 users collectively that trade in driver accounts for Uber, DoorDash and other ride-share and delivery apps.

“This black market allows people to acquire driver accounts for Uber and other services without going through the required screening process or even having a valid driver’s license,” the researchers wrote. “Meta is failing to meet its new, lowered bar for policy enforcement by hosting a thriving trade in fraudulent Uber driver accounts.”

For the report, TPP researchers created a new Facebook account and began typing “uber account” into the platform’s search bar. Before the words had been fully typed in, Facebook auto-populated “uber account for rent” as the first suggested search term.

That led researchers to dozens of Facebook groups where users sought or offered up active Uber, DoorDash or Deliveroo accounts. Prices vary, but accounts commonly go for $350- 430 for sale or $115 for rent every 30 days, according to the report. Users often posted publicly in the groups to advertise or ask for an account. Once they received a response, the requesters often suggested moving the conversation out of public view to direct messages.

“It’s particularly concerning when you think about the fact that many of the people that engage in these groups or are looking to rent accounts are people that would not be able to pass a background check or a criminal check to get an account to drive Uber,” said Katie Paul, director of TPP, which has been researching black markets on social media for several years. “It really thwarts a lot of the safeguards that companies like Uber, DoorDash and others have in place to try to protect consumers.”

Meta did not get back to KQED with a comment in time for this story, but the company does have a publicly posted Fraud, Scams, and Deceptive Practices policy that promises the removal of content that “purposefully employs deceptive means — such as wilful misrepresentation, stolen information and exaggerated claims — to either scam or defraud users and businesses, or to drive engagement.”

In a January post by Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, announcing looser rules governing political content, he wrote: “We have been using automated systems to scan for all policy violations, but this has resulted in too many mistakes and too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been. So, we’re going to continue to focus these systems on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, like terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams.”

Paul argued that the infiltration of the black market in account fraud extends beyond posts on Facebook. It’s also in the advertising, Meta’s primary revenue driver.

“Ads are notable because they’re one of the only things on the platform that are actually reviewed and approved before they are run,” Paul said. “Even if they later removed them, the company had still made their money in the process. The fact that they haven’t addressed this is largely because there are no regulations in place that require them to do so. So as we’re seeing a failure of regulatory enforcement or efforts on the part of Congress, we see these companies becoming more and more lax in the way that they moderate explicitly illegal or harmful content on their platforms.”

Paul also argues that Facebook is structurally worse than other social media platforms in terms of enabling black market behavior because of the platform’s global reach, and the ease of finding groups, which she describes as “the perfect digital toolkit for these black market traffickers of, really, anything you can think of, whether it’s human smuggling, account trafficking, antiquities trafficking. You can easily search — name the bad thing — and the words for sale, and dozens of groups pop up immediately.”

From there, Paul adds, the actors move transactional conversations to more secure apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, which are both also owned by Meta.

“Meta really owns the entire cycle of the issue there, including the final communications for delivery of whatever that black market trade is. With Google, if you’re talking about search ads, for instance, they could direct you to a website, but you’re not going to get that same level of anonymity or the kind of protected functionality that you see on Facebook,” Paul said.

Food delivery services, in particular, have faced regulatory scrutiny over concerns about unauthorized account sharing. As of March 1, 2025, AB-375 requires third-party food delivery platforms like San Francisco-based DoorDash and UberEats to provide the customer with the first name and photo of their driver.

“We’re deactivating more fraudulent accounts, conducting more real-time identity checks and preventing more offenders from returning,” DoorDash spokesperson Julian Crowley wrote KQED in a statement. Even before the new state law came into effect, DoorDash introduced a more robust system for flagging unauthorized drivers in Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle and other cities late last year.

Crowley added, “While many of these ‘ads’ are scams for accounts that don’t actually exist, we take all fraud seriously. Our teams actively monitor for suspicious activity — including ads for fraudulent accounts — and take action. We’ve reached out to Meta to collaborate in dismantling these groups and stand ready to work with enforcement to hold fraudsters accountable.”

“Account sharing is never allowed, and we have robust safeguards in place from account creation to trip completion designed to help verify that the person using an account is the rightful owner,” an Uber spokesperson said in an email. “In the US, all drivers and couriers must pass a background check, provide a valid photo ID and Social Security Number, and regularly verify their identity through our Real-Time ID Check, which uses selfies to confirm that the person behind the wheel or making a delivery is the same person that passed our multi-step screening process.”

Last year, Wired profiled a woman who made thousands of dollars fraudulently renting out Uber and DoorDash accounts before being arrested after Uber tipped off the FBI.

“Lyft’s Terms of Service strictly prohibit fraudulent activity of any kind, including account sharing or buying and selling Lyft accounts, and such behavior can and does lead to a permanent ban from the platform,” a Lyft spokesperson wrote KQED. “We have robust policies in place—including rigorous and thorough background checks and screenings for every driver—to help prevent fraudulent activity.”

“We have led the industry in taking action to secure our platform, and were the first major delivery platform to roll out direct right to work checks, a registration process, daily identity verification and now additional device checks for riders, including substitutes,” wrote a Deliveroo spokesperson.

While the California attorney general’s office, sometimes in conjunction with city or district attorneys, has cracked down on ride-share and food delivery companies in the recent past, it’s been for issues like classification of workers, data breach cover-ups and consumer privacy, not unauthorized account access. When queried directly about that issue, a spokesman for the AG’s office wrote, “To protect their integrity, we’re unable to comment on, even to confirm or deny, any potential or ongoing investigations.”