Lyft Driver Used AI Photo to Charge Two Teenage Girls Fake Damage Fee
Bert Gor's teenage daughters took a Lyft home from the beach in Boca Raton on May 16. They had their beach stuff with them. No food. No drinks. Just two girls, 14 and 15, heading home.
Then their dad got hit with a $75 damage fee.
The driver had submitted photos to Lyft showing the backseat allegedly trashed — fries scattered everywhere, a large yellow stain, a drink spilled on the floor. Gor asked his daughters about it and they denied it completely. He asked Lyft to send him the photos to see for himself.
That's when his 14-year-old spotted something.
"She goes, 'Dad, that's AI. You could see the Gemini logo on the bottom righthand side of one of the photos,'" Gor told a local news station. Gemini is Google's AI image generation tool. The driver had apparently used it to create a fake photo of a messy backseat — and hadn't noticed or didn't care that the tool left a visible watermark on the image.
"And I'm like, 'Oh, my God, you're right,'" Gor said.
He went back to Lyft and pointed it out. Lyft confirmed the images were AI-generated, apologized, and told Gor the driver had been blocked from the platform. The company said in a statement that it "takes damage disputes seriously and reviews each matter based on the available information" and that it had offered Gor reimbursement and permanently removed the driver.
Why This Matters Beyond One Family
The scheme itself isn't complicated — submit a fake damage photo, collect $75, repeat. Most people would look at a photo of a messy backseat, feel guilty even if they weren't sure they did it, and just pay. Seventy-five dollars is annoying but not worth a fight. A lot of people would let it go.
That's exactly what someone running this kind of scam is counting on. Multiply it across enough rides and the money adds up fast without anyone pushing back.
Gor's advice for anyone using rideshare apps is simple — actually check your charges. "If you're not paying attention to this and you're getting charged $75, I mean, you know, it can really add up," he said. "So you've really got to pay attention."
The fact that a teenager caught the AI watermark is both a cautionary tale for the driver and a reminder that the tools people are using to run these scams aren't always as clean as they think. Most people don't know what a Gemini watermark looks like. This particular 14-year-old did — and saved her family $75 and probably saved other passengers from the same driver pulling the same trick.
Lyft confirmed it's permanently removed the driver. Whether this kind of scheme is happening at scale across rideshare platforms more broadly is a harder question — and one that probably doesn't have a comfortable answer.
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