Woman complains; Ola goes to cops against cabbie, proxy

Cab aggregator Ola has filed a police complaint against one of its registered driver partners, Vishal Pareek, for letting a proxy driver ferry passengers.

The proxy driver, identified as Mahadev, is accused of misbehaving with a 22-year-old female student when she objected to a waiting charge on July 10.

The woman had booked the cab for pickup near Mysore Bank, KG Road. But even before the journey began, Mahadev put on the waiting charge. When she objected to this, he allegedly abused her and tried to hurl a footwear at her in full public view. The woman later approached the jurisdictional Upparpet police station and filed a complaint against Pareek, whose name showed up in the driver details.

A police investigation showed that the man who actually misbehaved with the student was not Pareek, a resident of Jnana Ganga Nagar near Ullal, but his proxy, Mahadev.

On Friday, Ola made a complaint to the police seeking legal action against both Pareek and Mahadev for unauthorised usage of Ola platform logins that should remain only with the registered driver according to the company policy. Any breach of this confidentiality will hamper accountability which will eventually compromise passenger safety.

"I would like to bring to your kind notice that this is an act of unauthorised login at our platform stealing the identity of the real driver and as such amounts to criminal breach of trust, identity theft, abetting a crime, defaming the company at large and other applicable provisions of the law," A M Iktear Uddin Anik, Head, Law Enforcements and Compliances, Ola, wrote in a complaint to the Upparpet police.