Danger On Demand

The sharing economy has made it a breeze to get anything you want, any time you want. But the inconvenient truth behind our new convenient lifestyle? Our willingness to trust perfect strangers may be putting our safety at risk.

- Hannah Seligson

One Saturday night last year, Maria*, 25, was at a rowdy bar celebrating a friend’s birthday. It was one of those great parties where you blink and it’s suddenly 2am. By then, Maria was tired, so she ordered an Uber – an occasional splurge on late nights, although she mostly tried to take the train. Five minutes later, her phone buzzed; the driver was outside. A little tipsy, Maria walked to the curb.“Are you my Uber?” she asked the guy behind the wheel of a car that was just pulling up.

“Yes,” he replied.

She got in, but soon became aware that he was turning onto the motorway in the wrong direction – north, instead of south, towards her home. When she asked why, the driver mumbled something about a different route. ‘Strange,’ she thought. “But I wasn’t going to argue with him,” she recalls. Maybe he knew a shortcut. As they whizzed past exit after exit, though, Maria realised she hadn’t checked his number plate against the one provided by Uber – and that he likely didn’t work for the company.

He demanded she hand over her phone. “Be quiet or I’ll rape you,” he hissed. He claimed to have a gun.

Stunned and terrified, Maria thrust her designer handbag, jewellery and bankcard on the front seat, lying that her cheap gold hoop earrings were expensive and reciting her PIN number. “I thought he was going to do something terrible to me and then leave me on the side of the road,” she says. “I thought I was going to die.”

It felt like hours later when he finally pulled off the motorway, miles from her neighbourhood. “Before I take you home, I’m going to do some pussy work on you,” he said. Panicked, she focused on getting out of the car. At a traffic light, she threw open the door and sprinted into the night.