Uber never planned to roll out new safety features, and its driver screening remained a joke. The whole program boiled down to a few instructional videos, which were unlikely to stop the Mazda Mangler from striking again. An Uber insider later said the fee was "devised primarily to add $1 of pure margin to each trip. It was obscene." It does take a certain kind of depravity to read passenger safety horror stories and only hear cartoon cash register noises.

In 2016, Uber was sued and paid a settlement of $25.8 million to passengers. That's about 0.82 cents per passenger, and as any math teachers in the audience may know, $28.5 million is substantially smaller than $500 million. But don't worry, Uber was also required to rename the "Safe Rides" fee to a "Booking" fee -- a brutal punishment which we're sure will dissuade corporations from ever trying something like this again.

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You can order through the restaurant's own site, but that might be fake too. GrubHub, without telling restaurant owners, registered over 23,000 domains based on the names of real restaurants. GrubHub uses those domains to compete with real sites. So if Dave's Clam Jam is at clamjam.com, GrubHub will set up clamjam.net, promote it over the real site, and charge a commission on orders placed through it.

Grubhub, Happy Kitchen, via The CounterOne of these is a local business with employees in your community. The other is a giant faceless corporation. Curious which is which? Yeah, us too.

GrubHub says they'll take down a site and hand over a domain if the relevant restaurant asks, but they're also not telling restaurants when those URLs are set up. Which is like your roommate grumpily insisting that they wouldn't have snuck into your room and worn your clothes in the middle of the night if you were going to get all uppity about it. Oh, and those fake phone numbers? GrubHub is currently facing lawsuits for secretly charging restaurants whenever someone called them, even if no order was placed. You could walk into a restaurant with a nail-studded baseball bat and not be able to shake them down as effectively.

Related: 6 Huge Companies Who Scammed Their Way To The Top

Instead Facebook continued to make in-game purchases remarkably easy, to the point that game companies themselves began reporting that virtually all of their customer service complaints involved child spending sprees. Even the soulless Angry Birds empire begged Facebook to do something. Facebook refused, and later circulated an internal memo stating that "company policy was to tell game developers to let children spend money without their parents' permission." In other words, Facebook is totally fine with stealing your money as long as your seven-year-old does the dirty work for them.

Related: 6 Outrageous Cons That Shouldn't Have Worked (But Did)

So Google said they would auction off the top spots in the search results, and that Google Shopping would compete with everyone else to bid. That sounded fair, unless you thought about it for two seconds. Competitors complained that Google Shopping could always outbid them for prime spots, because they were just moving money between different branches of the same company.

Google still needed to give the appearance of competition, so they got ad companies to set up fake sites. These looked like price comparison sites, but only promoted the ad company's clients. Google then offered huge auction rebates to these ad agencies, giving the illusion of competition without the troublesome bother of actually having to compete legitimately. And it was just complicated enough in its deceit that everyone ignored it to focus on whatever tech CEO was running nude through the streets with a knife that week.

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A reporter from Wine Searcher drove out to one Los Angeles address intent on a kooky "I bought wine from Amazon's secret store" story, only to discover a huge Amazon Prime warehouse where no one knew what the hell he was talking about. He only got as close as he did by barging past "Authorized Personnel Only" signs, which is hardly standard liquor store behavior. Very few legitimate stores make you shimmy through an unsecured window and outrun guard dogs before they'll sell you a case of prosecco. An employee finally told him the store was "not open right now," which was technically true, in the sense that it clearly didn't exist.

With the state government threatening an investigation, Amazon was left scrambling to cover up the issue. When an LA Mag writer went out a couple weeks later, a manager wheeled out a small cart containing one bottle of wine, one bottle of vodka, and a single case of beer, then couldn't work out how to take card payments. The reporter left empty-handed. Wine Searcher found similar situations at Amazon warehouses throughout the state, which appeared to violate California's liquor laws and their requirement to have all deliverable alcohol be available in the physical store. Amazon somehow managed to get licenses authorizing them to offer a "curated selection" of their stock (it must have been a harsh and teetotaling curator).

Scott Lewis/flickrWe can't decide if that's better or worse than being given a hard hat and told "Tequila? Sure, aisle 128, 11th shelf up."

This dumb ruse was clearly in response to the press attention. The Sacramento "store" had no booze on sale when Wine Searcher first asked, but was able to produce a solitary six-pack when the reporter showed up two days later. Another shopping trip for one bottle of wine took 31 minutes. So yes, Amazon runs totally legal liquor stores, assuming you only want Lagunitas and don't mind hammering a locked warehouse's "press here for assistance" button until you get it.

Related: 5 Shocking Stories Amazon Doesn't Want You To Know

But tip theft is at its most problematic in food delivery, where tipping is ingrained and assumed to go to the driver. DoorDash's app explicitly promised to make that easier; no need to rummage around for cash, realize you're out, then awkwardly hand the pizza guy a jar of pennies and a stick of expired gum. But that was a blatant lie. If you offer a driver a slice for the road, they'd probably have it pumped out of his stomach and mailed to shareholders.

DoorDash and Amazon both announced changes to their tipping policy after facing criticism (read: getting caught). DoorDash didn't apologize, but regretted that the policy had made "some customers ... feel like their tips didn't matter" simply because their tips absolutely did not matter. Then they kept doing it for a month after they said they'd stopped. Instacart announced a similar move, but is allegedly still up to some tip-related shenanigans, and mostly responds to driver complaints with "Guards, seize them!" Because if there's anything Silicon Valley hates more than market inefficiencies, it's you.

For more, check out Why Credit Cards Are A Scam - Honest Ads:

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