I don't know why this is making clickbait headlines again now, since it happened back in 2016, and can't really happen again. But I will assume TikTok, somehow. And Western-aimed media always loving a racist excuse to other those spooky, conniving, superstitious Orientals!
Ten years ago, when Uber first took off in China (their operations there are owned by a Chinese company now), they had a policy that let drivers still get a little bit of money if booked rides were canceled in a certain time frame.
And a whole bunch of Chinese drivers simultaneously realized that, hey, I can pad out my night with canceled rides, I just have to get a bunch of people to cancel!
By looking scary as fuck in the app!
Mashable reported on this back then as "Chinese vampire drivers." It is now being called "Chinese ghost drivers," I assume because the Chinese word translated as "ghost" is also used as an adjective for scary or freaky, and is in fact part of the word English usually translates as vampire (i.e., it means "blood-eating ghost").
Either way. Fun times.
This was just people trying to game a very shortsighted system. And I don't think most Chinese Uber users in 2016 thought they were actual evil spirits, they just went "This crazy avatar makes me think this could be some kind of dangerous scam." Which was THE POINT.
Trending News: In 2016, a strange and unsettling scam began surfacing on ride-hailing apps in China. Passengers booking rides through Uber s
