Latest update:28 January 2026, 4:45 PM IST

The elderly woman had no idea she was being scammed by a car driver after her child booked from a different website.

The driver of the car later revealed that he was not an Uber. (Image source: X)

An auto driver in Bengaluru has allegedly brought bad name to the city by playing a clever trick on an elderly woman. This car driver pretended to be an Uber rider and charged the passenger “nearly double the amount” after she arrived at the destination, her child claimed in an anonymous Reddit post.

The incident has revived discussions about passenger safety, fraud and impersonation. In his post titled ‘Car Scam in Karnataka: Impersonating Uber Drivers and Exploiting Elderly Riders’, the user claimed that the scam occurred with his mother after she booked an Uber ride for her from a different location. Since the elderly woman did not have access to the app or specific details about the trip, she did not realize when she was being scammed by this motorist.

The driver demands double the fees

“She’s not tech-savvy, so only I can see the Uber app – driver details, trip status, OTP verification. My mother had no way of confirming on her side whether the trip had actually started or whether the OTP shown in the app had been accepted,” the Reddit user wrote.

The user claimed that his mother was waiting at the designated pickup point when a car driver arrived and introduced himself as an Uber rider. “I believed it and got in,” wrote the user, who raised suspicions about the car driver after noticing the app, where the real Uber driver was still waiting. To gain confidence about the authenticity of her trip, the car driver requested a one-time password from the woman, which was clearly never used.

The user wrote: “The trip on my app has not started yet, because this driver was not the one assigned to book.” “On my phone, I could clearly see that the actual Uber car was still showing as ‘On Pickup’. The ride had not started, and the OTP had not been verified in the app. When I called my mom, she told me she was already in the car.”

When the driver revealed he wasn’t from Uber

Only when the car driver took the woman away from the pickup location did he reveal his true identity, “casually” explaining that he was not an Uber driver. “At the destination, my mother insisted on paying only the Uber fare shown on the app. The driver refused and demanded almost double the amount, fully aware that she had no practical or safe way to argue or get out of the situation. She just paid to get it over with,” the user wrote about his mother’s disappointing encounter with this motorist.

The user felt very sorry for his mother and criticized the car driver in his post on Reddit. They found it particularly “disgusting” when the driver “laughed” at their mother’s plea to pay only the amount they had booked the original Uber ride for.

“The intent is not to provide a service, but to fleece people by any means available, for small, short-term gains that do not measurably improve their lives. This was not confusion. This was not a mistake. This was deliberate impersonation and exploitation of an elderly passenger,” the user wrote.

The user also raised a word of caution through his example to others, their parents and elderly relatives, who may also not have enough knowledge about online flight booking apps and could be vulnerable to falling into similar traps.

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