A 3am call and a drained wallet
Uber driver Dhruva Javkar was working the early hours in Wellington when a scammer rang, claiming to be Uber support. The caller already knew Javkar was behind the wheel – “he said, ‘I can see that you’re driving right now'” – and warned of a complaint about someone else using his account. The real hit came at 11am, when the scammer called back as Javkar slept. “I was in a super deep sleep, but I picked up the call,” he told Stuff. He handed over a four-digit code that arrived from what looked like a legitimate Uber number.
That was all it took. The scammer logged in from Auckland, swapped Javkar’s bank details for their own, and used Uber’s instant cash-out feature to drain the $726 sitting in his earnings wallet. Uber’s response, when it arrived, said “it appears that your account may have been accessed illegitimately using your login credentials through a third-party source” – and offered tips on securing his account. No commitment to reimburse. Javkar accepted he had been “deceived by a sophisticated scam”, but asked a sharp question – why did changing bank details and instantly withdrawing earnings require no extra identity check?
Not a one-off
This is a documented pattern, not bad luck. A Metro News investigation in June 2026 found three in ten businesses on Christchurch’s Riccarton Road had been targeted by the same Uber Eats scam. Bruce’s Bahn Mi owner Lisa Tran fielded a call from someone posing as Uber Eats customer service who extracted verification codes and changed her account’s payment details. She avoided loss only because she caught it in time. Other outlets on the street reported scam calls as often as once a week.
Earlier cases, reported by the NZ Herald and useful here only as background, show what happens when the money actually goes. A Porirua cafe reportedly lost $2,400 during account set-up, while a Napier restaurant waited roughly six weeks to recover close to $3,000 in frozen payments after scammers changed its details – continuing to fulfil orders the whole time without being paid. In October 2025, Waitemata Police warned that scammers were using drivers as unwitting couriers to collect fraudulently ordered goods, with Detective Sergeant Mark Renfree saying offenders were “involving innocent and unaware Uber drivers in the process.”
Who actually carries the risk
The common thread is not the scam method. It is who eats the loss. In every case the platform pointed to third-party activity or compromised credentials, and recovery hinged entirely on the platform’s own investigation and goodwill. For a conventional employee, payroll fraud is the employer’s problem to fix. For a gig worker, it is their problem to chase through a support system – often offshore, with no guaranteed timeline and no regulator standing behind them.
That imbalance is exactly what the Supreme Court’s November 2025 ruling exposed. The Court found unanimously that four Uber drivers are employees, ruling that Uber exercises close control over routes, monitoring and behaviour, and that drivers are “the face of Uber’s business” rather than independent operators. University of Auckland entrepreneurship professor Rod McNaughton wrote in November 2025 that “much of the early appeal of gig-based models rested on shifting risk onto workers”. The EMA’s head of advocacy Alan McDonald conceded that same month that “current employment law does not deal with platform work”, because the precedents predate it.
A legislative fix that critics say misses the point
The Government moved fast. New Employment Relations Act changes took effect on 21 February 2026, creating a ‘specified contractor’ category to give platforms more certainty on classification. Deloitte’s April 2026 Tax Alert noted the Supreme Court decision “had the ability to seriously disrupt the rideshare and delivery sectors”, which the reforms were designed to steady.
But academics Amanda Reilly and Annick Masselot argued in August 2025, before the changes landed, that the proposals may make misclassification easier and “don’t address the range of problems associated with platform work, including fluctuating pay and arbitrary deactivation”. They pointed to Australia’s “employee-like” worker category, with protection from unfair disconnection – a model New Zealand has not adopted. Fraud vulnerability sits squarely in that unaddressed space.
What it means for anyone using a platform
For a driver, a restaurant on Uber Eats, or any operator leaning on platform logistics, the practical question is simple – when your account is compromised, what is your recovery path? Under current arrangements the honest answer is: it depends entirely on the platform. There is no employment relationship to invoke, no regulator with jurisdiction over account-compromise disputes, and no guaranteed timeline.
The tax architecture underlines the imbalance. Under IRD rules effective April 2024, non-GST-registered ride-share drivers keep only an 8.5% flat-rate credit from the 15% GST collected on their fares. The platform collects, remits, and controls the security systems in between. When those systems fail, as Javkar found at 11am, the worker is the one left counting the loss. The ‘specified contractor’ framework does nothing to change that.
Sources
- The midnight hustle: How a fraudster tricked a sleepy Uber driver and cleaned out his account (2026-07-05)
- Scamsters target Christchurch Uber Eats outlets (2026-06-22)
- Waitemata Police warn of fraud involving rideshare app Uber (2025-10-24)
- Supreme Court Decision: Uber Drivers are Employees (2025-11-17)
- Uber court ruling paves way for NZ gig economy reckoning (2025-11-23)
- Uber Decision: Old Structures Versus New Thinking (2025-11-23)
- The Uber effect: The employee-contractor debate reignited (2026-04)
- Goods and Services Tax on Listed Services – AD277 (2025-08)