Uber threatened to drop a driver from its delivery service after she opened a suspicious envelope she had picked up for the rideshare app and found it contained illegal drugs, which she then handed over to police.
To add insult to injury, the disgruntled drug runners appear to have left a one-star review on the driver’s account for not completing the February 16 delivery.
The Brisbane driver, who only wants to be known as ‘Emma’, told Daily Mail Australia that after handing the drugs over to police and explaining the situation to Uber, she was warned to ‘tamper’ with the delivery.
Uber driver ‘Emma’ said the ride-sharing giant warned her about opening a package she rightly suspected contained illegal drugs
“I thought their response would be ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe our service was used for potentially illegal activity, we need to shut that sender down and give all their details to the police,'” Emma told Daily Mail Australia.
‘No, they just turned around and said if anyone tells us again that you tampered with their package, we will limit your account.
“This incident really freaked me out and their response freaked me out.”
Emma’s ugly ordeal began on a Friday night when she turned up at an address to receive a package to be delivered.
“The Uber app doesn’t tell you what kind of package it’s going to be,” Emma said.
The text from Uber said that if there were any similar reports of Emma opening packages in the future, she would be banned from delivering goods
‘It just says package collection from this address. I have delivered a package before and it was a birthday cake.’
She knocked on the door at the address, but those inside knew nothing of the intended delivery.
“I went back to my car and this guy came out from another address and he said ‘Are you Uber?'” Emma said.
The man explained that he had not given the address to Uber, so he did not know how it had been mixed up.
“He gave me a sealed white envelope with nothing written on it,” Emma said.
‘I thought maybe it was cash or documents so I just put it in the front seat and started driving.’
Her suspicions were raised not by the wrong address, which Emma said ‘happens all the time’, but by the mysterious envelope.
Emma filled out a form to explain why she couldn’t deliver the package, but got no response from Uber
“I reached out and felt the package and I thought ‘that doesn’t feel like cash or documents,'” Emma said.
‘I pulled over and held it up to the light to see through it so I wouldn’t have to open it up.
‘It felt suspiciousd I thought: “I don’t want to be a part of committing a crime”.
So I opened it very carefully because I thought if I’m wrong and it’s nothing suspicious, I’ll just seal it and it’ll be fine.
“There was something rolled up in toilet paper, and it was a small zippered bag of white crystals.
Emma was deeply shaken by the discovery.
“I’m such a nerd,” she said.
‘I’ve never been around any kind of drugs at all, so I wrapped it back up and put it in the envelope and sealed it.
‘I was still shaking when I handed the delivery to the police. I didn’t want it near me. I wouldn’t even touch the envelope.’
Emma also sent a detailed explanation of what had happened during the aborted medicine drive
While calling triple-0 to find the nearest police station, Emma became concerned about being tracked on the Uber app by the package’s sender and intended recipient.
“I was worried if I sat there too long or went to a police station they might follow me,” Emma said.
‘I switched off my phone so the sender and recipient couldn’t track me.’
She drove to the nearest police station, where she said the officers, who had been notified of her arrival in advance by the Triple O operator, were fantastic.
But her potential client was giving her a gift at this point.
“I opened my phone and the recipient had been messaging me through my Uber app,” she said.
‘He was like “Hey, where are you?” and “Are you on your way?”
“He tried to call me too, but it goes through an Uber phone call handling thing.”
To stop the drug runner from messaging her, Emma sent a message to Uber support using their form template to explain why the package wasn’t delivered.
Emma said Uber didn’t respond to that message, but later that evening they sent a text asking why she hadn’t delivered the package and she had to explain the situation again.
It is the second reported incident where an Uber driver was used to ship illegal drugs
Uber promised that a member of their ‘community operations team’ would call her about the incident.
But because Emma was busy, she couldn’t answer the call, but still managed to communicate with the employee via SMS.
The employee, named as ‘Jerome’, noted that according to Uber’s community guidelines, ‘delivery people are expected to deliver packages to the intended destination’ and it was against those guidelines to ‘open or tamper with the package’.
He said that in the future, if Emma thought she was transporting an illegal good, she should just hand it in to the nearest police station.
“Please note that we conduct regular reviews of users of the app,” Jerome’s text said.
‘If we continue to receive similar feedback indicating that a package has been inappropriately disposed of, opened or tampered with, it may lead to restriction of your access to package delivery requests on the driver app.’
After receiving this unexpected revelation, Emma immediately decided to close her account.
In response to the standard question asking her why she was leaving, Emma said she was ‘shocked by the way you reprimanded me when this happened and I found it quite an offensive response’.
Last April, a Sydney Uber driver, who wanted to be known only as Jess, told the media that she opened a suspicious delivery package and discovered crystal meth.
In retaliation, disgruntled drug dealer Jess left a one-star review, which Uber only decided to remove after the incident attracted media attention.
The same appears to have occurred to Emma, with a new one-star review left on her account, although it doesn’t provide any feedback to identify who it’s from.
Despite Uber’s insistence that she should not have opened the package, Emma said the police officer told her she was doing the right thing.
“If I hadn’t opened it and saw those guys being busted for drugs, I would have been involved,” she said.
“I would potentially have been charged.
‘If it hadn’t been something risky, I would have just completed the delivery and apologized to the recipient.
‘It’s not like I opened it because I thought “this looks fun”.’
An Uber spokesperson said that “if a delivery person suspects a package is suspicious, they should never open the package and immediately report to Uber and law enforcement”.
“Any illegal activity while using the Uber app is unacceptable and may result in immediate loss of access to the Uber app,” the spokesperson said.
‘When sending goods, riders must agree immediately before the request that they will not send prohibited or illegal items, including drugs.
“Our dedicated law enforcement response team, which includes ex-Australian police officers, is also available to assist the police in their investigation of such cases.”
Queensland police said they could not comment on drug-related matters.