Lauren Smiley, writing in Wired about Priscila Barbosa:

Just three years after landing at JFK, she had risen to the top of a shadow Silicon Valley gig economy. She’d hacked her way to the American Dream.

An absolutely wild story. I was reluctant to use "defrauding" in the headline. Barbosa exploited holes in the identity verification systems for Uber, DoorDash, and other gig economy businesses, allowing her and other undocumented immigrants to work. But she did commit fraud.

Two things:

1. Barbosa is smart, entrepreneurial, and tech-savvy. While in Brazil, she

studied IT at a local college, taught computer skills at elementary schools, and digitized records at the city health department. She also became a gym rat […] and started cooking healthy recipes. In 2013, she spun this hobby into a part-time hustle, a delivery service for her ready-made meals. When orders exploded, Barbosa ramped up to full-time in 2015, calling her business Fit Express. She hired nine employees and was featured in the local press. She was making enough to travel to Walt Disney World, party at music festivals, and buy and trade bitcoin. She happily imagined opening franchises and gaining a solid footing in the upper-middle class.

And during her exploits:

Barbosa noticed that all of her axed accounts had, in fact, been created on her phone—iPhone de Priscila Barbosa. What if she made her computer look like a different device each time? She restarted her laptop, accessed the web through a VPN, changed her computer’s address, and set up a virtual machine, inside which she accessed another VPN. She opened a web browser to create an Uber account with a real Social Security number bought from the dark web. It worked.

Her skills should be admired—and used for good. In a different world, under a more welcoming set of immigration policies—or, let’s admit it, if she was European—Barbosa would be an expat not an immigrant, and hailed as a success story.

2. Uber prosecuted Barbosa, claiming financial losses.

During the legal wranglings, the company accused the ring of stealing money and tallied its losses: some $250,000 spent investigating the ring, around $93,000 to onboard the fraudulent drivers, plus safety risks and damage to its reputation.

Claiming losses from onboarding drivers who then went on to pick up and drop off riders? Ridiculous.

Defense attorneys shot back that no one lost money at all: The jobs were done. The food was delivered. People got their rides. The gig companies, in fact, profited off the undocumented drivers, taking their typical hefty cut—money that, once the fraud was discovered, there was no evidence they’d refunded to customers.

Far from losing money, Uber profited because of these drivers. Indeed, had Uber simply ignored these drivers, or better still, advocated for a way to legally support them, they would have only benefitted by having a large pool of eager and willing partners.

The real victims were those who had their identities appropriated. Except:

None of the three identity-theft victims who spoke to me—a Harvard professor and two tech workers—knew how or when their identity had been stolen. None had experienced financial harm. They felt unnerved because their information was exposed, but they were also curious about, and even showed a degree of empathy for, the thieves. One victim mused to me, “It’s kind of a sad crime in a way, isn’t it? Obviously, it’s a crime and they shouldn’t have done it, but sad that people have to do stuff like this to get by.”

Additionally, Barbosa and her partners could have done far, far worse with the data they had. Alessandro Da Fonseca was one such partner:

With all the personal information the ring had access to—enough to open bank accounts, credit cards—their only con was to… create Uber profiles? Fonseca shrugged it off. “We are not criminals, with a criminal mind,” he told me in a jail call. “We just want to work.”

Smiley writes about Barbosa:

she felt like an entrepreneur, supplying the demand. Undocumented immigrants wanted to drive in the gig economy, and with the system that existed, they legally could not. People like Barbosa—with no family in the States to sponsor them for green cards and their undocumented status precluding them from applying for many other types of visas—were short on options. “If the US gave more opportunities for immigrants to be able to work legally and honestly here,” she says, “nobody would look for something like this.”

Completely agree. Immigrants (documented or otherwise) are 56% of the gig economy in San Francisco. 78% are not white. I’m guessing the numbers are similar across the country. They may be “taking our jobs,” but only because they’re not jobs most (white) Americans seem to want. Without immigrants, much of the gig economy would crash.

They just want to work.