Asking for a refund is never fun. But what's even worse is when asking for a refund causes the company to charge you more than you ever paid the company in your life.
That's exactly what happened to Jaime Hessel after Uber NYC gave her a refund and unintentionally charged her $16,000. Hessel was going to a Crawl for Cancer fundraising pub crawl one day when she decided that an UberX car would be quicker than a subway ride. So, she hired an UberX driver. However, the driver acted oddly. First, he sat at the location he picked Hessel up at for a few minutes.
Then things got worse. "At first, he followed the GPS, and took the correct right turn on to Meeker Avenue. However, he soon started taking phone calls and checking his voicemail," and, according to Hessel, ignoring the directions.
"I'm paying attention to his GPS, and I'm very familiar with the area, and I see him go right by McGuinness, and I'm really curious how he's going to get to 50th Street." Hessel estimates that the missed turn added an additional seven minutes to the trip. Still, "the driver was fine at that point. He wasn't even hostile or frustrated," The Gothamist reported.
The driver continued messing up, and his messups increased the cost of Hessel's trip to $56. Hessel contested the cost and contacted Uber support about the price increase. Thankfully, Uber responded with the $15 credit. However, within a few days of the occurrence, the service charged her (thankfully expired) credit card $16,000.
Hessel corresponded with Uber for multiple days trying to get it to respond to her claims, but most of the people Hessel talked to said that they could not find evidence of the charge. Eventually, Uber customer support found her charge, cancelled it out and was willing to completely refund the first charge.
"I don't care if they don't reimburse me the $56.40 ever. I just want to make sure I don't have a balance with them. That $16,000 balance on my account? That bothers me," Hessel told The Gothamist.
You can read Gothamist's full report here.
