After the battle on the roads, now Uber and OLA are in a battle in the courtroom. Uber has sued OLA for $7.5 million for making false bookings and cancelling them on its platform. This act of OLA has resulted in a loss of revenue as well as the goodwill of the company, Uber alleges.
According to the court case filed by Uber, OLA has made about 94,000 fake user accounts with the ride-hailing service and used them to make more than 405,000 false bookings.
Apart from the fake bookings, Uber also alleges that it had faced a huge revenue loss when OLA drivers made prank calls to its drivers on New Years Eve 2015 and asked them to shut down the app because of a technical glitch which needed to be fixed.
On the other side, OLA has completely denied any involvement in such wrongdoing.
Uber’s investigation identified locations and internet protocol addresses of tens of thousands of users who had booked and cancelled rides, using information logged when a new customer account is created on Uber’s platform, the source familiar with the company’s case said.
As per the data submitted by Uber, 660 accounts used to make fake bookings came from a building housing Ola’s office in the western city of Pune. Most of the rest were created near Ola’s office in the tech hub Bengaluru, it said.
In the court filings, Uber said more than 23,000 of its drivers quit due to “illegal and wrongful interference” between September 2015 and February 2016.
On a statement, Ola said the company had made its own checks and found no correlations in the thousands of data points submitted by Uber in its complaint, which included names and mobile phone numbers alleged to belong to Ola employees.
Uber’s legal submissions included several images of LinkedIn profiles, locations pinpointed with Google Maps and hundreds of phone numbers it said belonged to people associated with Ola.
