Law enforcement agencies from time to time do conduct raids on various companies, whether it be because they are suspected of tax fraud or some kind of financial crime, so the concept isn’t totally unheard of. However it seems that according to a report from Bloomberg, they have revealed that Uber had a crafty way of making sure the authorities left empty-handed.The report claims that Uber had deployed the use of a program called “Ripley”, which basically locked all computers in the office to prevent the police from accessing them. The reported cited an incident back in 2015 where Quebec’s tax authority came to Uber’s office in Montreal, believing the company to have violated tax laws.
It then adds, “Like managers at Uber’s hundreds of offices abroad, they’d been trained to page a number that alerted specially trained staff at company headquarters in San Francisco. When the call came in, staffers quickly remotely logged off every computer in the Montreal office, making it practically impossible for the authorities to retrieve the company records they’d obtained a warrant to collect. The investigators left without any evidence.”
In response to the article, Uber released a statement to Bloomberg that reads, “Like every company with offices around the world, we have security procedures in place to protect corporate and customer data. When it comes to government investigations, it’s our policy to cooperate with all valid searches and requests for data.”