Comment by bostonsre
6 years ago
Anyone know if it would be considered fraud and/or illegal to exploit this? I would consider doordash and grubhubs tactics of falsely representing themselves as restaurants to be more unethical. It would be great if someone could scale a solution that would take those arbitrage opportunities and pass them on to the drivers and the restaurants.
Yes, it's fraud.
In general, knowingly obtaining money, goods or services you know you are not entitled to is fraud/illegal.
Here's an example of someone going to jail for knowingly exploiting a glitch: https://www.inquirer.com/philly/hp/news_update/20071026_N_C_...
Your case is more clear cut because that is a glitch in the website. It seems that in this case Doordash is offering a promotion. Calling that fraud would be like calling taking advantage of reward points fraud.
Meanwhile, door dash never asked for the restaurant to participate in the "promotion," so screw them... They are offering to deliver boxes of dough at deathly inflated prices, with no other agreements with the restaurant. How is taking advantage of that "service" fraud?
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It gets dicier when the restaurant starts shipping out plain pizza dough.
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It seems like it would depend on who's initiating the action.
While the restaurant preparing "partial" pizzas to ship to coordinated orders is obviously fraud, I'm not so sure "Asking the restaurant owner about their costs, then independently ordering a large number of pizzas" qualifies.
It's not your responsibility if Doordash has shit code and auditing. And given VC-onomics, it's not even clear how you would be certain this isn't "operating as intended."
> While the restaurant preparing "partial" pizzas to ship to coordinated orders is obviously fraud
How so? They're making the pizzas the way the customer wants them. The 'objective' tastiness is none of the delivery middleman's business. And there's nothing wrong with offering a bad pizza for $24, as long as the customer knows what they're getting.
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> While the restaurant preparing "partial" pizzas to ship to coordinated orders is obviously fraud
Does Doordash allow customer menu modification requests? "No cheese, no tomato sauce, no onion" etc. That would also then fall under shit code and auditing :)
It doesn't seem like fraud when they are still delivering an actual pizza; that's basically just leveraging a sale. It becomes more dubious when they aren't delivering the finished good.