That's not what they were trying to argue. They were trying to argue that the video of the car leaving as soon as he got out (and him continuing to walk away) proved that he was expecting the car to leave as soon as he got out, therefore he was lying to the court about having intentionally left a backpack in the car.
Could be some middle ground. That video doesn't really help his case to me. He knows the car is in the middle of the street, and not parked. The driver does start rolling while the passenger is clearly very close to the car. Even if you assume he didn't notice the car leaving, it seems to speak to the drivers intent. If the driver was intending to steal something, why risk pulling away when the owner of the bag is so close?
It's plausible to me that the driver didn't hear, or didn't pay full attention to the request to wait, and just pulled away...and that the bag was taken by a later passenger.
I would have been happy to get the money, and probably would have skipped the blog post.
The driver might have realized (too late) what happened, if the driver noticed the second passenger left with a backpack they didn't come in with. Then gotten scared and decided to avoid calls and lie about things.
It shouldn't be possible to avoid police investigation just by avoiding calls. UBER should give all the details to the police and then the police should do their job and call the driver and the next passenger. Where I live (Poland), not responding timely to the police/court calls/mails would get you into big trouble and in the best case would end up in a fee and in the worst case you could be brought to the hearing by force.
Sure. I've heard of that problem, both with Uber and Lyft, on things that had nothing to do with fraud though. I don't know that either company does anything to reward drivers that answer calls/texts, or punish those that don't.
Sure, run after a speeding car flying into traffic, leave your other bags behind, risk your life so that you can stop a corrupt uber driver from robbing you. And if he refuses to give you your bag back, just fist fight him. Man up and take some responsibility!
Every day I hear something so ridiculous from Uber I can't believe it. Seems like Lyft's biggest advertisement should be "Lyft: we're not uber"
He should be at fault for not being as fast as a car? Most people aren't going to be able to run at >10mph for very long, forget about anything more.
And even then, suppose he had caught up to the car and the driver didn't want to stop.
Just slimy.