Comment by astura
6 years ago
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?
Exactly. That's the real problem. Even if it's just a "trial". Somehow getting a delivery number on the restaurant's listing without their knowledge or consent is abuse. Good thing they get punished for it.
It gets dicier when the restaurant starts shipping out plain pizza dough.
This made me wonder: what if a restaurant puts a pain dough "pizza" for $30 on their menu?
Of course, no one would order it. But in this situation, an aggregator could offer it and the restaurant owner could take advantage of that.
It smells like fraud, except that every individual step seems legitimate (albeit weird). I'm pretty sure you're allowed to charge ridiculous prices for common goods if you so choose...
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Not if the customer ordered plain pizza dough
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What restaurant doesn't allow alterations?
"I want a supreme pizza, hold the pepperoni, sausage, peppers, onions, olives, sauce, and cheese".
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.
Well, if the restaurant reimburses the customer after, it probably would become a problem.
Way around this: private owner places his own orders as customer, pockets profits as owner. That might be legitimate - but remember: if you take legal advice from the Internet, you get what you paid for.
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This depends on whether you think the pizza restaurant's customer is doordash.
You could make a good argument that this was the case. The restaurant sells to doordash, who paid for a pizza with toppings.
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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.