In July 2015, Michael Cordas hailed an Uber and waited for it at the appointed place, outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel in midtown Manhattan. And he waited. The car’s estimated arrival time came and went. After 10 minutes, Cordas tried calling the driver. Instead, he got an operator recording—the number was a “non-working number.” A text he sent returned the same response. A few minutes later, the Uber app notified him of a $10 charge, because he had “canceled” his Uber request.
After going through the same rigamarole two more times—in Toronto and Irvine—Cordas, a California resident, became the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed today in the U.S. District Court’s Northern District of California.