Gaming the Indian Startup Ecosystem

Published on Apr 2, 2019 ⸱ 2 min read ⸱ 19 views

The startup ecosystem is fraught with more people gaming a product/service than using it. Using this post to keep a single repository of all scams/tricks done by users. I hope to keep this post as up-to-date as possible.

If you come across stories or have been a victim of such scams, please share them so that I can add them here.

ZoomCar: No link for this anecdote as I heard the story from friends. It takes ~40,000 to change tyres on ones existing car. ZoomCar's cost ~5,000 per day for rent. Users of ZoomCar are taking ZoomCar's on rent, replacing the old tyres from their existing cars with the tyres from ZoomCar's cars. Users leave with new tyres at ~10% of the actual cost.

OLX: Posing as Buyers, some users are sending Payment Receipt links instead of the payment itself.

Swiggy: For every order from Swiggy, restaurants are reducing the amount of food per plate.

Onward.

Warning: This post should not be seen as a repository of Indian ingenuity. It's not.

Note: All blogs posts till 2022 were migrated to this platform (react+next+tailwind). While all efforts were made to migrate wihtout any loss, the migration lost some images and broke a bunch of links in old posts. If you spot anything amiss, please notify me?