Fraudsters Use Location Spoofing to Take a Bite from Food Delivery Apps

Today we announced the publication of a new Mobile App Fraud Insights Report for Food Delivery Apps. The study was conducted to assess the state of fraud in food delivery mobile apps and the results highlight that there is a high volume of location spoofing  on food delivery apps, and a significant percentage of devices are registering multiple accounts on both driver and consumer apps, indicating drivers and consumers who are abusing promotional offers.  

The usage and adoption of food delivery have accelerated in the past two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and have fundamentally changed how we put food on our plates. The availability of user-friendly apps for consumers, and tech-enabled driver apps has enabled the food delivery market to grow three-fold since 2017 to a global market size of $150 billion. 

In the U.S. the food delivery market is dominated by four major companies: Doordash, GrubHub, UberEats and Postmates which was acquired in 2020 by GrubHub. Doordash alone generated $1.28 billion in revenue (a 268% increase over 2020) as millions of users have downloaded the Doordash app and placed food delivery orders. 

In addition to the four largest U.S. food delivery apps, other big-name food delivery companies around the world include:

• Just Eat (UK)
• Deliveroo (UK)
• Zomato (India)
• Glovo (Spain)
• Food Panda (Singapore)
• iFood (Brazil)
• Rappi (Colombia)

All of these companies have millions of downloads of their mobile apps.

The Incognia Mobile App Fraud Insights Report shares data and insights from the Incognia network on new types of fraud based on location spoofing that are emerging on food delivery driver apps, and that are adding fraud losses and eating into profits. Drivers spoofing their location to “game” the driver app platforms to increase their ride volume, pick the best routes, and qualify for premier driver status, are just some of the current and most rampant fraud schemes. In addition, a significant percentage of devices register multiple accounts both on the driver apps and consumer apps, indicating users abusing promotional offers. 

The following location and device intelligence was detected by Incognia for food delivery apps:

• 11.9M location events classified as GPS Spoofing, 1.9M per month on average
• 80,000 devices generating locations with GPS Spoofing, 13.3K devices per month on average
• Location spoofing on food delivery driver apps is 6.5 times higher than on other apps
• 2.6% percentage of devices registering multiple driver accounts
• 1.9% percentage of devices registering multiple consumer accounts

To read the full report and analysis please download the Incognia Mobile App Fraud Insights Report - Food Delivery.