Uber Eats filed a complaint on April 22 after finding that since January 2022, meal orders had received undue reimbursements from it.
The investigations were entrusted to the gendarmes of the SR (research section) of Paris who arrested the two men.
A Telegram channel “Fast Eats” offered to place orders on the platform at -50% of the real value of the meals. The defendants thus recovered 50% of the real value of the order, as well as full reimbursement by the company Uber Eats, the prosecution said.
The authors used new customer accounts for each order, making it possible to obtain reimbursement for the first order. To do this, they used a fraudulent program (bot), allowing them to automate their tasks. 137,000 fraudulent accounts were detected, according to the same source.
The American company estimated its damage at 2.4 million euros, for the period between January 1, 2022 and June 26, 2024.
The investigation established that the Telegram channel “Fast Eats” offered two types of services: the sale of meal orders at -50% and the sale of “tech”, training intended to guide a novice step by step in order to enable him to carry out scams himself.
These “techs” were sold between 300 and 500 euros.
According to another source close to the case, the young man arrested in Ile-de-France, born in 1996, without a criminal record and without a profession, is suspected of being the owner of the Telegram channel, of having received money and of having caused around 200,000 euros of cryptocurrencies to disappear.
“He disputes the facts with which he is accused,” his lawyer, Me Ian Knafou, told AFP.
