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On November 1, the Mumbai Police arrested three Ola cab drivers for allegedly conning several passengers by manipulating the mobile application to add more kilometres to the destination, thereby increasing the fare. The police found that at least 40 cab drivers had taken advantage of a glitch in an outdated version of the app to con customers. An Ola spokesperson refused to comment on the issue.
How did the Ola drivers manage to manipulate the system?
Acharya, who was earlier a cab driver but has recently given up driving, told the police he found the glitch in the old Ola app.
On the driver interface of the app, the cab would appear on a bridge in the GPS map even if in reality it was below the bridge. So, whenever the cab was going under a long overpass, bridge or flyover, the drivers would switch off the app. Once they had crossed the bridge and taken either a left or right off the road, they would switch on the app again. The map that earlier thought the vehicle was on the bridge, would then look for a route that would connect the bridge to the current location of the cab. The re-routed course would be longer than the one the driver had taken.
For example, a cab driver travelling below the Eastern Freeway would switch off his app. As per the app, he is on the Freeway, an elevated road, while he is actually on the road below. He would drive for 2-3 kilometres with the app off, reach Govandi and switch on the app again. The app, which assumed the cab was above the freeway, would consider the route from above the freeway to Govandi which would entail going all the way back to Wadala, thus adding around 10 kilometres to the trip. In reality however, the cab would have covered a distance of just 2 km.
The drivers operated on the Mumbai airport to Panvel route and during one trip, they would stop at three or four locations below the bridge thus adding several kilometres to the trip.
Excerpted from https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/how-cab-drivers-in-mumbai-manipulated-the-ola-app-to-cheat-customers-7064946/