uber (spammers) account "temporarily disabled" but app still works

 Do things work for other people?  I mean, they don't work for me.  One account or another seems to get disabled every day.  Today it's Uber.

In Brazil, I met someone whose phone was always on 1%, because he believed it was a big waste of energy to charge it overnight, and he used Uber to get everywhere, and it seemed to work great for him.

I, on the other hand, have had around 2 Uber rides, with bizarre pricing / payment issues on both, got loads of notification spam from Uber, have uninstalled the app as a result several times, found a weird Uber bug to do with adding a payment card, and now my account is disabled.

For my first Uber ride, I selected to pay in cash.  It was a 4 hour ride.  I'd missed the last train to another city, and wanted a ride.  I guessed the Uber would be around half the 500 EUR I was getting quoted by a taxi.  I don't know why, but the Uber app did not disclose the price to me or the driver until we arrived.  It then showed a price of 80 EUR briefly, before this, and any record of the ride, disappeared altogether.  This would not have covered fuel, let alone any labour for driving, so I gave the driver several times that.  Later, I tried again to find a record of the ride in my Uber, and there was none.  Soon after, I got notification spam about Uber Eats, so I uninstalled the app.  I'd allowed notifications, stupidly thinking they would be about specific rides I was taking.  Instead, I got notifications spamming me about why don't you order food.

I recently installed Uber on my iphone.  I guess it was on this phone before, because it still had my configuration.  This time I disallowed notifications, because now I know Uber are notification spammers.  This time I was only interested in card payments.  Cash is good in general, but not on Uber.  I want the automatic records of everything.

I tried to add a new mastercard card.  It was a new version of an old card which had expired, so a couple of the details were different, including expiry date, but the number was the same.  This failed.  It must be a common case, but Uber can not handle it.  It failed, saying the card was already on the account.  But the card on the account was shown as expired.  But the card I was adding was not expired.  This is the market leader with evamp of 74B USD.  I added a different card instead.

I took a ride.  I think I chose to pay with the new card, or assumed it automatically would use this.  At one point it said "Uber cash".  Someone had told me their card got declined with lots of small Uber payments.  So Uber took a bigger card payment, instead of several smaller ones.  The balance for this subaccount is shown somewhere in their Uber app.  Likewise, if this subaccount with Uber is on zero, and their card is declined for a ride, this account goes negative, and a later payment sorts it out.  Seemed to make sense.  So now I'm thinking: "Is Uber cash the name they give to this subaccount that works like that?  Or is Uber cash where you physically pay the driver in cash, like I chose to do one time before, but didn't do this time?  I don't know."

After the ride, the Uber app offered me an email receipt, and I said yes.  When I checked my email today, I had receipts for the amount before and after the tip added at the end.  So far, fine.

The payments list also looks fine.  There's one for the original amount 62.50 GBP, and one for the tip, both shown as being against the correct card.  But then it says "A temporary hold of £62.50 was placed on your payment method •••• [..] This is not a charge and will be removed. It should disappear from your bank statement shortly."

 

That's strange and confusing.  Is the temporary hold for the same amount as the original payment, so it's still paid for?  Or is the thing shown as a "payment" somehow being backed out, and why?  Looking at my wise.com transaction list, or at Uber in the app or on the web, might clarify things, but from the Uber email receipt this is unclear.

I tried logging in to Uber web first, and got a basic error page saying my account was "temporarily disabled":

It said to visit help.uber.com for further assistance.  It's not even done as a link, as tho hypertext was never invented, and in any case the URL is not for anything specific, so if it was a link, it wouldn't link to the actual thing.

But, using the app on the iphone, it still seems to be working.

And wise.com recent txs shows the trip cost and the tip correctly, so whatever the confusing email Uber receipt was on about, it seems "Uber cash" does mean the balance on that subaccount, not the thing where I pay the driver in cash.