S S.

I just came out of a nightmare experience with Lyft. I had to wait 34 minutes at the airport for my Lyft ride under the scorching heat (almost 100) a couple of days ago because the first driver cancelled on me after making me wait for 20 minutes and I was assigned a new driver. By the time I got dropped off I was almost heatstruck and daze. I stupidly left my backpack in the backseat. I contacted the driver right away but no response. Lyft customer care was beyond useless. It says all I can do is keep contacting this driver through the app's Lost and Found system. Unbelievably, Lyft customer service kept telling me Lyft's Terms of Service do not require drivers to return items found in their cars to riders (!) and that drivers are not Lyft employers, and as such, they are not required to be keep in contact with Lyft. Lyft Customer care assured me they were sending messages to the driver from their end too. I could tell the location of my laptops in the lost backpack through Apple's Find My app, but Lyft still would not release the driver's full name, phone # or anything helpful citing "privacy requirement."

To make a long story short, I filed a report with the local police. Based on the satellite pictures of my Find My ping location, a detective "visited" the driver's apartment yesterday and retrieved my backpack thank God. Incredibly, the driver claimed to the police detective that she had never received a single message from Lyft or from me. Not knowing what to do with my bag, she was "safeguarding" it in her apartment!

In the meantime, I had asked Lyft to compel the driver to respond to us by deactivating her until she responded but Lyft refused. Which means, while Lyft was aware that I was having this difficulty with a potential thief of a Lyft driver, Lyft was assigning this driver to other passengers.

As far as I'm concerned Lyft is a borderline crime organization.