A mum has claimed she ordered an Uber to Ukraine after wanting to ‘help out’ after having ‘one too many drinks’ but was spared the £4,500 bill as she had ‘insufficient funds’.
Leoni Fildes had been enjoying her friend’s birthday on Saturday, March 5 when the group started talking about the ongoing situation in Ukraine.
The mum-of-two was asked if her partner, who is in the armed forces, might have to fight if the UK entered the war and she proclaimed that if he did, she would follow him.
The 34-year-old, who runs a dog grooming business, says she drank a ‘few double pink gins and shots of Sambuca ’ by the time she ordered the cab, as well as a bottle of prosecco.
She then drunkenly opened up the Uber app on her mobile phone to book a taxi - a trip that would cost her a whopping £4,578, according to Mirror Online.
Leoni was thankfully saved from her drunken impulse due to having ‘insufficient funds’ in her account - however, Uber still tried to take the payment nine times.
The following morning the mum had “flashbacks” of her risky mistake after her bank called to warn her about fraudulent activity on her card.
She says she’s now glad she didn’t have enough money in her account and has questioned what could have happened if she had embarked on the trip.
Leoni said: “I’m 34 - I should know better.
“The next day I didn’t remember doing it. I was like ‘oh my god’.
“I woke up to my bank ringing me, thinking my card had been [used fraudulently].
“Uber tried to take the payment nine times out of my account. They were pretty determined.
“I had a little flashback when the bank called and I said ‘I think it was me - sorry’.
“Normally, Uber allow a trip in advance but they’ve recently stopped it so I was lucky.
“I remember when we were looking, we said ‘oh, we’ll get the comfort one’. That’s dearer - the XL one.”
If Leoni had ordered a regular UberX taxi, it would have cost her between £2,564 and £3,313, but if she had splurged out on an UberXL, it would have cost between £3,688 and £4,758.
Leoni explained: “I’d gone out with one of my friends in Swinton. We came up with the conversation about the war in Ukraine.
“One too many drinks later, we were trying to get a taxi home. We said ‘shall we get a taxi and go help them’.
“We’d been out for about four hours so I’d had a few double pink gins and quite a lot of shots of Sambuca and a bottle of prosecco. I think that might have tipped me over the edge.
“I don’t know what I’d do if Uber had let me order it. I don’t think I’d have got in but you don’t know after a drink. I might have piled into the taxi and realised when we got further out.
“It would have been coming out of my account and I don’t know where I’d have woken up.
“After we’d done that, I couldn’t get a taxi for about an hour and a half. They were allowing me to go to Ukraine but not 10 minutes up the road back home.
“It was only about 10.30 and I had to ring a few different taxi companies then to get a taxi. I got in at about 12.”
An Uber spokesperson added: “We can confirm that no trip requests were successfully made in this instance. We are looking into this further to understand what happened.”
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