优步司机什么“鬼”

优步司机什么“鬼”

一些优步用户下单约车，结果发现接单司机的相片扭曲，而且面容可怖，同时在车抵达之前，他们的行程突然开始并很快结束。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

creepy诡异的；令人毛骨悚然的['kriːpɪ]

spook惊吓；鬼怪般地出没[spuːk]

squelch消除；镇压；压碎[skweltʃ]

exploit开拓；剥削[ɪk'splɒɪt; ek-]

subsidy补贴；津贴['sʌbsɪdɪ]

fade-out渐隐；消失 ['feid'aut]

Mystery of China’s‘ghost’Uber drivers（545words）

By Sherry Fei Ju and Lucy Hornby in Beijin

It’s not quite Halloween,but an eruption of creepy faces on driver profiles at Uber in China has spooked potential passengers and raised suspicions of an organised attempt to scam the car-booking app.

Some Uber users have booked cars only to be assigned drivers with distorted photos and scary faces,while their trips suddenly begin and end before a car has arrived. In other cases,“ghost”cars appear in the app but never arrive,resulting in false charges.

The incidents come at a time of transition for Uber,which merged its China operations with rival Didi Chuxing in August. The similarity of the“ghost driver”incidents in a number of different Chinese cities over the past month imply an organised attempt to exploit staffing gaps during the handover,experts said.

Uber said the complaints reflected“individual drivers’scamming behaviour”,adding that it would“use technology to squelch such behaviour”and block the accounts involved.

Nathy Chen,an Uber customer,had an experience typical of many recent complaints. She booked an Uber car but the driver that accepted had a scary picture. Before she had left her building to meet the car,the driver had already initiated the trip and ended it 30 seconds later,leaving her with a small charge of Rmb9（$1.40).

Uber has been refunding the charges to customers who complain.

“It was at night and from the driver’s location I was expecting the driver to arrive very soon. The map showed the driver just passed me,but there was no car around,”said Veaer Wang from Shandong province,who realised the next day he had encountered a‘ghost driver’when he saw similar complaints online.“The road was very narrow and there’s no way a car could have passed me without me seeing it.”

It’s not the first time that Chinese scammers have developed sophisticated means to exploit the car-booking service. Scams were particularly common when both Uber and local rival Didi Chuxing were offering generous subsidies to both passengers and drivers in an effort to gain market share. That battle ended with the merger deal last month,in which each company took a 20 per cent share of the other and Didi acquired Uber’s China operations.

But the recent rash of“ghost drivers”are very different from traditional individual scammers,said one analyst with a leading data group.“They seem to be an organised group with the technical back-up for such incidents,and not without a purpose,”he said.“This is a time of transition for Uber after the merger with Didi. A lot of the team work handover has not been finalised yet,which gives scammers an opportunity t o exploit the system.”

Yin Zuoning,Uber’s chief anti-scamming officer,recently joined Yidao,another car-booking company,contributing to the staffing gaps during the transition.

Since the merger was announced,both companies have reduced the subsidies that in Uber’s case were costing $1bn a year. Uber’s popularity has already begun to fade,with its app on Apple’s Chinese App Store dropping from number one to number 80 among all iPhone apps and fifth place among travel apps.

A similar fade-out occurred after Kuaidi Dache,a top ranking car-booking company before it merged with Didi Dache in February 2015 to form Didi Chuxing.