Local Restaurants Are In A Fight Against This GrubHub Scam

The COVID-19 Pandemic has caused financial stress for businesses and workers across the world and Capital Region Restaurants are not exempt from the closings and people generally being afraid to dine out. The pandemic has also cause fraud and scamming to be at an all-time high.

Cyberfraud and Ransomware are on the rise and also a Grubhub scam that allows scammers to steal food from local restaurants. Grubhub has a no questions asked return policy. This means that Grubhub customers are entitled to a refund regardless of the circumstance of the customer being dissatisfied.

This is how the scam works, the scammers will order food online have the food delivered to their residence with the “no contact” policy option on. This policy allows the driver to drop the food off and just call or text the customer and alert them that their food is outside of their residence. When the food is delivered the scammers, will claim they never got the food and enjoy their stolen meal.

This isn’t a victimless crime because Grubhub refunds the money from the restaurant to the thief, so it's possible to get scammed out of thousands of dollars and food. This is also a hard crime to prosecute because of how difficult it is to prove the person did actually received the food. It's also hard to prove what happened to the stolen property because the person most likely already consumed the food. The person literally eats all of the evidence of the crime.

Personally, I find it annoying to have someone leave food on your doorstep. Most of the drivers just leave the food on the ground and keep it moving. During these times Grubhub should probably do more to protect the restaurants from this kind of scam. Maybe have the drivers send a picture of the delivered item to the restaurant and the customer to avoid this type of fraud.

Contactless delivery doesn’t look like it is going away anytime soon. Hopefully, this doesn’t cause more financial strain on the restaurant business which is already struggling due to the pandemic. When people are hungry they will find a way to eat.