Scandal of

UNSUSPECTING customers may be at risk of being attacked in their own homes by imposters delivering Uber Eats meals, an investigation has revealed.

The threat was exposed after the Sunday People uncovered a racket in which accredited couriers rent their identities out to people who have not been vetted.

Our female reporter spent hours delivering food using the account of a male driver who hired out his login for £125 a week, with no questions asked.

Our probe follows concerns over the behaviour of some Uber taxi drivers which culminated in Transport for London scrapping the firm’s cab licence in November.

One Uber cabbie subjected a woman passenger to a sex ordeal.

In separate incidents, other unauthorised drivers uploaded photos to account holders’ profiles.

Last night critics of Uber’s operations voiced their horror at our findings, with one saying it highlighted “ongoing failure” and another calling it “the gig economy at its worst”.

Three months ago the food delivery giant vowed to crack down on security measures by introducing facial recognition technology.

Criminals

But our reporter bypassed checks to use the account of driver Joao Marco Raposo Brilha, 21, in defiance of a strict company ban.

Brilha, who called himself “BJ” in an ad on Gumtree, is one of scores of Uber Eats staff believed to be fraudulently leasing out their accounts.

Uber has claimed workers will be asked to submit “real-time” photos at any moment to be checked against the licensed profile in a bid to crack down on criminals and unauthorised drivers gaining access to customers.

Yet our reporter was not once asked for a photo, despite the potential red flags of BJ changing both his password and number.

Uber Eats was understood to be unaffected by the taxi decision as most couriers ride bikes and those who use cars do not carry passengers.

To register a car on the app, drivers must provide insurance documents and link in vehicle registration details.

BJ uses a bike but we made deliveries in a Ford Fiesta after he showed us how to change the app’s settings so it did not track we were driving.

Our reporter took two Mcdonald’s meals and two kebabs to four London addresses over three hours, using a £17 picnic satchel from Argos rather than a branded Uber Eats delivery bag.

Yet not one of THEBOASTFUL: customers questioned her identity, despite the licensed driver pictured and named on the trackable order being a man. One even buzzed the reporter into a 10-block apartment building after she announced herself over the intercom.

And staff at Mcdonald’s on Old Kent Road and The Best Kebab in New Cross, both in south-east London, merely checked the order numbers our reporter showed and handed over the food without a second glance. Each delivery earned under £5, meaning an unvetted driver renting an account would have to do 25 orders a week just to cover the £125 hire fee.

More than 50,000 restaurants in the UK and Ireland serve customers via the app in 100 towns and cities. The food delivery market is expected to be worth £10bn by 2021.

We launched our probe following the ban by TFL on taxi service Uber Rides in London in November following a number of high-profile cases.

The transport watchdog said safety breaches had “left passengers at risk” and that Uber did not have “a robust system for protecting passenger safety”.

It found that unauthorised drivers exploited a loophole in Uber’s system to carry out at least 14,000 fraudulent journeys in the capital using other drivers’ accounts.

Uber driver Nadeem Afzal was put on the sex offenders register after exposing himself to a female passenger and driving her around for nearly two hours in 2018.

And in an even more horrific case a customer mistook a private car for an Uber cab which had been cancelled and was raped by the driver.

The TFL findings prompted concern over Uber Eats, which gives drivers and bike riders access to customers’ homes.

We looked at buy-and-sell site Gumtree and within ten minutes we found a number offering to rent Uber Eats accounts for £60 to £125 a week. Portugese national Brilha responded instantly to our reporter’s email with a set of “rules”, including warning us not to cancel any orders once accepted.

However he failed to make several basic checks such as whether we had a criminal record and permission to work in the UK.

He then sent us a series of Whatsapp messages in broken English sprinkled with emojis and

Brilha issued ‘rules’