Debunking the AI ​​food delivery scam that fooled Reddit

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AI tools often make my work easier. However, today I want to talk about how they make it harder.

Over the weekend, like thousands of other people searching Reddit, I stumbled upon it a contribution It suspected significant fraud on an unnamed food delivery app. The post, written by a new account called Trowaway_whistleblow, purports to be from a software engineer preparing to leave the company. It detailed various ways the company manipulated the platform against customers and delivery drivers: for example, slowing down standard deliveries to artificially make priority orders appear faster, and charging a “regulatory response fee” that the company used to lobby against driver unions.

Perhaps the most irritating allegation in the post, which the whistleblower cited as the main reason for his resignation, was that the platform calculates a “desperation score” for its drivers based on when and how often they accept deliveries. The whistleblower wrote:

“If a driver normally…