Third year charged £1159.01 for an Uber journey she didn’t take

 A King’s third year woke up this morning to a massive bill for an Uber journey she didn’t even make.

Sophie Hiscock, who studies Midwifery, opened her emails to find a message saying she was going to be charged an earth-shattering £1159.01 by the app-based taxi firm.

Speaking exclusively to The Tab, she said: “Basically I just woke up this morning and I got an email saying ‘We weren’t able to take the money from your account for your Uber on Sunday’. I was like ‘What Uber on Sunday?’ because I deleted the app months ago.

“Someone had gone from Mayfair to Manchester and back to Enfield, and they used my account. In big red letters at the top of the email it said ‘£1159.01’.”

Sophie, from Prestwood, Buckinghamshire, was unable to get in contact with Uber for hours after telling them what happened.

She explained: “They have no contact number, the one which my dad found online somewhere is out of service or something like that, and you just have to email them on this form. I tweeted them and they said they were ‘looking into it’.”

Unlucky Sophie was forced to cancel her bank card to avoid the charges being applied to her account.

She said: “Obviously they couldn’t take it out of my account because I maxed out my overdraft, but they kept trying to, so I had to cancel my cards and stuff. I was concerned they’d pursue it and it would affect my credit rating.

“It’s just really bad customer service, and so annoying when I don’t even have the app. I only ever used it for the free code and then once for an emergency.”

We spoke to Uber, who insisted that incidents like Sophie’s experience are rare and the rest of us have nothing to worry about.

A spokesperson said: “She obviously gets refunded, that’s not a discussion. It hasn’t been charged to her account.

“This is not indicative of any kind of data breach or any hack at all. What’s happened is that [Sophie’s account details] were entered as a normal login, which leads us to believe that people get credentials from other websites if other websites are hacked.

“We do always encourage people to have individual passwords for everything they use – if one is compromised then all of them are compromised. ”

Uber were also quick to reassure us that your card details are safe with Uber, and defended their slower response time – saying their “escalation process” for dealing with security breaches means issues take longer to deal with.

They confirmed: “All of your financial information is stored with a third party, so even if someone is able to login into your account, they are not able to access any of your details.

“This does happen, but everything has been sorted and you shouldn’t be worried about it at all. Most [incidents] get resolved within 24 hours, which if you look at the thousands of tickets we receive is quick.”