We trust freelancers the driver took us around, our food delivery and the boredom of grocery shopping. We believe that our app avatars are safe and that our employers support that. One woman has made a fortune exploiting that safety fantasy, and her story is both thrilling and terrifying.
Priscila Barbosa arrived in the United States with just $117 in her pocket and the promise of a ride from the airport—a ride that never materialized. Little did she know that on that day in 2018, crying outside JFK International Airport, she would become a $10,000-a-month wire fraud crime lord.
Her incredible story is told in detail by Wired, and it really highlights the resilience and determination of a woman as well as the terrifying ease of ride-sharing and job-sharing app scams. Barbosa came to the United States from her native Brazil on a six-month tourist visa. After being abandoned by her contact in the United States, she reinvented herself and made life interesting. Her time in the United States began with a humble job at a Brazilian-owned pizzeria and a single rented room. Then she discovered job apps.
But without a U.S. driver’s license, it seemed like she would be locked out of the lucrative gig economy—until someone offered to rent her an identity for $250 a week. When a client left her wallet in her car, a new plan and a new way of life literally fell into her lap. From Wired:
One of her clients had left her wallet in the car. She followed the woman’s roundabout instructions to return it, driving to two distant locations for over two hours. Frustrated, at some point Barbosa opened her wallet. She looked at the woman’s driver’s license, blonde hair and blue eyes. Barbosa snapped a photo. She thought the woman might tip her or at least say “thank you” for wasting two hours of her time, unpaid, doing her a favor. Instead, the woman was rude and brusque, pushing Barbosa like she was looking for. “I said, okay, I’ll use this now.”
Over the next few weeks, she clicked through the driver recruitment process on both Uber and Lyft, reading through the steps to create her own account, weighing the risks. Finally, lying in bed on Christmas Eve, the first night she’d spent without her family, the moment came: She opened her phone and scrolled to the blonde woman’s driver’s license. Barbosa uploaded the license to the Uber app. She used the woman’s name but her own insurance and registration. She entered her own email and iCloud phone number and put her own photo—brown hair, brown eyes—in her driver profile. She created a Social Security number, applied, and went to bed.
The next day, Uber approved the account. So Barbosa was self-employed.
Barbosa quickly gave up driving altogether. She focused on creating new accounts and renting them out to other immigrants for use on apps like Uber, DoorDash, and Lyft. She exploited the apps’ massive security flaws to build her black market business, flexible enough to keep the scam going for two years. Barbosa estimates she made nearly $1.4 million during that time.
At one point she was making $10,000 a month, although she said Wired At one point, she was making $15,000 a week. The money funded trips, designer clothes, several cars, and her family’s lifestyle back home in Brazil. It seemed like the good times would never end… until they ended, as they often did, with an FBI agent knocking on her door. But if Barbosa is anything, she’s a resilient survivor.
Barbosa’s story is fascinating and well worth your time. Come check it out. Wired check no.
