SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - Uber's background checks failed to weed out more than two dozen drivers with criminal records - including registered sex offenders, a kidnapper, burglars, and a convicted murderer - prosecutors say in state court.
San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon and Los Angeles DA Jackie Lacey filed a 62-page amended complaint on Wednesday detailing the criminal histories of 25 Uber drivers who have given thousands of rides to customers in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The original civil suit , filed in December, claimed that Uber misleads users about its background check process for drivers and alleges that it illegally charges customers for rides to and from airports.
The amended complaint says that the ride-hailing upstart unfairly touts its rigorous background checks, when in reality Uber does not even put its drivers through the same fingerprinting process required of California taxi drivers.
Prosecutors say they learned that Uber drivers had criminal histories after those drivers were cited for an illegal airport ride or street hail.
In one case, it was discovered that an Uber driver was convicted in 1982 of second-degree murder in Los Angeles. He was paroled in 2008 and applied to drive with Uber under a different name than the one on his criminal record, according to the complaint.
Another driver convicted in 1999 of committing lewd or lascivious acts on a child under 14 had given more than 5,500 rides to Uber passengers, "including unaccompanied children," the complaint says.
Uber also employed drivers with felony convictions for kidnapping for ransom with a firearm, assault with a firearm, grand theft and fraud, robbery, identity theft, burglary, and sale of methamphetamine, the district attorneys say.
Five drivers were also found to have misdemeanor drunk driving convictions within the last seven years, according to the complaint.
Uber has since backed off of its claims of performing "industry-leading" background checks, instead stating that the company's safety is "constantly improving." It also eliminated its statement of "background checks you can trust."
The company's new safety message, posted as a blog on its website, says that "every system of background checks that is available today has its flaws," but adds "we believe that the procedure used by Uber and other TNCs stack up well against the alternatives in terms of safety - while not disadvantaging people who may have been arrested but never charged."
Uber admits its system is "not 100 percent accurate."
Prosecutors say the company "has strengthened its impression that it does everything it can to ensure its customers' safety by incorporating specific misrepresentations of fact into the very impressive sounding laundry-list of process descriptions and disqualification criteria that Uber communicates to the public."
Among these misrepresentations are claims that Uber's background-check process is "often more rigorous than what is required to become a taxi driver," that its background checks "go back as far as the law allows," and that the process includes a "lifetime" disqualification for sex offenders.
In reality, Uber does not use fingerprint identification, so the company cannot ensure that the information it obtains from a background check actually pertains to the applicant, the complaint says.
Instead of using fingerprints, Uber relies on its drivers to submit personal identifiers online. The information is then sent to a private vendor for a background check.
