The Brazillian Phoenix who Played the Gig Economy

July 17, 2024 7:58 AM

Priscila Barbosa was lured to Boston on a failed promise. With no realistic alternatives, she found her way into the dark side of the gig economy, taking on Uber, Lyft, Door Dash, and others. Hundreds of thousands of dollars later, the FBI found her. From WIRED. (long read)

"It wasn’t just about business, though. Barbosa readily admits she enjoyed not just the challenge but the ego boost of beating powerful Silicon Valley companies on their own platforms. 'I feel pride in breaking their stupid systems,' she wrote me. 'These companies are all about money. They don’t care for the drivers (we are just numbers for them).' So she held open yawning security loopholes and waved undocumented drivers in. 'I never had evil intentions,' she explains. 'I always thought I was helping my people.'"

posted by hydra77 (12 comments total)

So the "crime" here is enabling people who are capable of working to work, since they are otherwise prevented by monstrous US immigration law? I can't cheer that there is a way for a middleman to skim money by providing these IDs, but I also can't get especially exercised about someone doing this.

It feels like it's a kind of orphan-grinding machine story in a way - the meme with the headline that's like "Heartwarming: Child sells lemonade and raises $20,000 to save orphans from the orphan-grinding machine". This one would be something like "Criminal: scammer helps people to get licensed to do honest work providing services".

None of this would have happened if we just...made it easy to emmigrate to the United States.

And then this woman, who is obviously enormously talented, could use her skills on something with more social utility than just letting people who are capable of driving for Uber drive for Uber.

We could have a luxury gay space communism future if we just didn't hold back all the working class people and create fake scarcity to enrich the rich.
posted by Frowner at 8:21 AM on July 17 [32 favorites]

Exactly. I admire her hustle and ambition. She's obviously smart, and wants to work hard, yet she's forced to live outside the law... to what purpose? As the article states, immigration law in the US hasn't been updated in 30+ years. Give people a chance if they want it.
posted by hydra77 at 8:28 AM on July 17 [7 favorites]

Love her. Honest criminals like her built this country.

If she was a real estate scammer, they would have given her permanent residency by now.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 8:39 AM on July 17 [8 favorites]

That story was a real ride.

My favourite bit is where Uber's lawyers are like 'you scammed us and it cost us money' and her lawyers were like 'if we scammed anyone, it was the passengers and you didn't exactly give them their money back, did you?'

It would have been pretty easy for Uber et al to actually verify that the drivers they were hiring ... excuse me, allowing to use their market-based platform ... were who they said they were and were properly qualified to do their jobs. But it wouldn't have been cheap and automated, so they didn't.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:45 AM on July 17 [20 favorites]

I recently had to use a gig-taxi for the first time. The regular taxi folk wouldn't service where I needed to go. The driver informed that Lyft lets the driver keep much more of the fare than does Uber (he had done both).
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:52 AM on July 17 [5 favorites]

I thought this was a fascinating story. It was clear she had hustle and drive, and wild that she went to jail but Uber didn't even get fined? I'm curious though if this would affect the folks whose SSN's are being used, do they have to dispute taxes that they 'earned'?
posted by Carillon at 11:09 AM on July 17 [1 favorite]

I'm curious though if this would affect the folks whose SSN's are being used, do they have to dispute taxes that they 'earned'?

It could have been much worse than that, if any of the people whose SSN's were being used were receiving Disability benefits from Social Security,

and had to prove all over again that no, they really COULDN'T do paid work. :(
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:29 AM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Methinks that the Uber et al didn’t actually DO anything with those SS numbers, they just needed to collect them due to those pesky government regulations.
posted by Melismata at 11:46 AM on July 17 [5 favorites]

I remember back in 2016 with Austin, TX made the requirement for gig drivers to get fingerprinted for background checks, and Uber and Lyft pulled out of Austin in protest. And given with the article talking about drivers renting out Lyft and Uber accounts from other drivers, it seems that they don't care who is driving the car, only that they get the payment for rides.
posted by ShooBoo at 1:29 PM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Thoughts on reading ... this is a fascinating story, I don't know if I blame her ... wait, what? That's not crochet! It's knitting. What's with the media and their inability to tell the difference?

(Okay - peering closely at the picture: it's two knitted things and crocheted eye patch.)
posted by jb at 2:54 PM on July 17 [1 favorite]

I am stuck at the line where Wired said she “kitted out her computer with a terabyte of memory” - as a teenager, guessing based on her age that would be approximately 2002 or so, a terabyte of memory would have cost something like $140,000. No computer at that time would even have supported a terabyte of memory. Even assuming that the author meant internal storage (and not memory), you’re looking at something like $1700-ish dollars for the storage alone (and that may be an underestimate, some sources say storage was around $12/gb at that time).

All of which is to say - in a magazine that ostensibly is focused on technology, details matter. Do better, WIRED…
posted by caution live frogs at 5:01 AM on July 18

Enjoyed her hustle until the part where she snitched on the arranged marriage people.
posted by youthenrage at 12:22 PM on July 18