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Nigeria Country Manager at Bolt, Yahaya Mohammed, has addressed the issue of fake ride requests and cancelling which rose sharply on the platform in Nigeria and South Africa in the past few days.
According to Mohammed, the company has taken steps to block accounts involved in this trend and is working to prevent future occurrences.
Mohammed in an interview with ARISE News on Friday explained that he became aware of the situation through messages, both internally and externally, and immediately sought a solution.
“This thing has happened as early as 6 am in the morning, and I tried figuring out a solution through my internet channels,” he said.
Regarding an incident where a driver in South Africa drove 50 kilometers to pick up a customer, only to find out it was a fake request, Mohammed said, “The driver getting a request 50km from his point of location is actually something that should not be accepted by the driver.”
Mohammed emphasised that drivers have the ability to set a kilometer rate for accepting rides, with a minimum of 2 kilometers and a recommended 4 kilometers.
“So if you get anything absurd like 50 kilometers, we don’t expect you to actually take that because you would drive for about 1 hour and will not really get compensated for that long distance pick-up,” he said.
Mohammed also addressed the issue of international ride bookings, which Bolt encourages.
“We are available in 50 countries, and many people, until recently when we had this abuse, the feature has worked for a lot of people,” he said.
To trace and block fake ride requests, Bolt uses a combination of tracking high volumes of orders and restricting IP addresses.
“We just able to track high volume of orders being made without having any finishes, just ordering and not actually completing the rides, and you are doing it cross-country,” Mohammed explained.
“All we do is try to block volumes of where these orders are coming from for both Nigeria and South Africa, and the second and more permanent solution was to trace IP addresses from both countries and restrict them from ordering outside the country.”
Regarding punishments for permanently blocked users, Mohammed said, “Investigation would be done internally, and obviously, everything would be analysed on a core hard basis on how you ordered, and past history of performance with riders.”
Mohammed also hinted at possible compensation for drivers who went on wasted trips.
“In-depth analysis of the rides that were booked and the kilometers wasted during the journey and seeing whether there is room for that, but at the moment, it is something that is currently being discussed, and the communication would go out to the drivers in 3 days.”
To prevent similar incidents in the future, Bolt will implement more restricted access, particularly for international feeds.
“Going forward, we would have more restricted access in terms of particularly these two countries, whenever you have international feeds, though it’s not ultimately an error on the app,” Mohammed said.
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