Viral Reddit Whistleblower Claim About Food Delivery App Exposed as AI Hoax

A Reddit user who claimed to be a whistleblower at a major food delivery company — and whose post went viral — has been revealed to be a fake, with evidence pointing to the use of artificial intelligence to fabricate the allegations.

The now-debunked post appeared on Reddit, where the user alleged that the company he supposedly worked for was exploiting both its drivers and customers. In the post, the author positioned himself as an insider exposing unethical practices.

“You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories,” the poster wrote.

Claiming to be intoxicated and using public Wi-Fi at a library, the individual described in detail how the company allegedly manipulated legal loopholes to withhold drivers’ tips and wages. The story resonated with readers — in part because similar accusations have previously proven true. DoorDash, for example, was sued over tip practices and later agreed to a $16.75 million settlement.

Despite the plausibility of the claims, the story itself was fabricated.

While misinformation online is nothing new, the scale of this hoax was unusual. The Reddit post reached the platform’s front page, amassed more than 87,000 upvotes, and was widely shared on other platforms, including X, where it received over 208,000 likes and generated 36.8 million impressions.

holy fucking shit pic.twitter.com/hLU3aZqY7c — Jesse (@d0wnsideofme) January 2, 2026

The deception began to unravel when journalist Casey Newton, who publishes the newsletter Platformer, attempted to verify the whistleblower’s claims. After initial contact on Reddit, the poster contacted Newton via Signal. It provided what appeared to be a photograph of an Uber Eats employee badge, along with an 18-page internal document.

That document allegedly detailed the company’s use of artificial intelligence to calculate a so-called “desperation score” for individual drivers. However, as Newton continued investigating, it became clear that the materials were part of an elaborate AI-generated hoax.

“For most of my career up until this point, the document shared with me by the whistleblower would have seemed highly credible,” Newton wrote. “Who would take the time to produce a detailed, 18-page technical document just to troll a reporter? Who would bother creating a fake employee badge?”

Although journalists have long encountered deceptive sources, the increasing availability of generative AI tools has significantly heightened the verification burden. AI systems frequently fail to reliably identify whether images or videos are synthetic, complicating efforts to authenticate digital evidence.

In this case, Newton used Google’s Gemini to confirm that the image of the badge was AI-generated. The detection was enabled by Google’s SynthID, a watermark designed to withstand cropping, compression, filtering, and other image alterations.

Max Spero, founder of Pangram Labs, works directly on tools designed to distinguish AI-generated text from human writing.

“AI slop on the internet has gotten a lot worse,” Spero said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Some of this is due to the widespread use of large language models, but there are other dynamics at play as well. There are companies making millions that pay for what they call ‘organic engagement’ on Reddit — which often means attempting to go viral using AI-generated posts that mention a brand.”

While detection tools such as Pangram’s can help identify AI-generated text, they remain imperfect—particularly for images, documents, and multimedia content. Even when a hoax is eventually exposed, the misinformation may have already spread widely.

As a result, users and journalists alike are increasingly forced to approach social media content with scepticism. In fact, when the author of this article mentioned plans to cover “the viral AI food delivery hoax on Reddit this weekend,” an editor assumed it referred to a different incident.

There was, in fact, more than one viral AI-generated food delivery hoax circulating on Reddit that weekend.