Restaurants on alert over food delivery platform fraud

Australian restaurants have been warned to look out for imitation listings on food delivery platforms after a chef in the United States claimed she was being defrauded by food delivery platforms Seamless, GrubHub and Yelp.

The chef and owner of Michelin starred Kin Khao restaurant in San Francisco, Pim Techamuanvivit, has said on Twitter that her restaurant was listed on online food delivery platforms without her consent, delivering food to customers which was not from her restaurant.

After receiving a phone call asking for a home delivery, she searched online and found her restaurant was listed on Seamless, Grubhub and Yelp.

“They’re so hungry to get your money, they don’t care who makes the food they’re deliver[ing] to your home," she said. "It can be some rando dirty warehouse somewhere. Because they sure are not picking up the food from Kin Khao."

The Tweet sparked other US restaurant owners to come forward and share similar experiences of their own.

A spokesperson for GrubHub said it had added Kin Khao to its platform but referenced the incorrect menu for the restaurant.

"As soon as they reached out to us expressing they’d like to be removed and flagged the incorrect menu, we honoured the request," the spokesperson said.

The practice has not been reported in Australia yet, with local food delivery platforms saying they have procedures in place to ensure the integrity of their service.

Speaking to The Age, Angus McLachlan, co-founder of mobile food ordering app Bopple, said restaurants need to be alert to the dangers.

"It is bound to happen because from a technology standpoint when you own the customer data and the transactional data you know what the customer is ordering, when they are ordering and how much they are spending so you can very easily replace the restaurant partner unfortunately," he said.

Sheridan Randall, 30^th January 2020