Following a BuzzFeed News investigation into Uber's internal customer service system — which led to Uber's revelation that the company received five claims of rape, and 170 claims of sexual assault directly related to an Uber ride as inbound tickets to its customer service database between December 2012 and August 2015 — Uber responded shortly after publication with the following message, which we are publishing in full. 
 
 Dear Ben, John and Mat, 
 
 We have worked with your team over the last week to answer questions about safety at Uber, but the story you have just posted fails to take into account the many facts we have provided to Buzzfeed. Given that our business depends on accountability and transparency, we are now sharing that information publicly so that our riders and drivers have the facts and can judge for themselves. 
 
 Getting people from point A to B safely and reliably is the single most important thing Uber does. It’s why we have a dedicated Trust and Safety team, overseen by Joe Sullivan (whose entire career has been focused in this field, first as a federal prosecutor and then at eBay, Facebook, and now Uber) and run by Phil Cardenas (the former head of Trust and Safety at Airbnb). 
 
 This team exists to reduce safety incidents, and its success is judged on that one metric. Because even one incident is too many. It’s why Uber has invested heavily in technology to improve safety for everyone before, during, and after each ride. Every Uber trip is GPS-tracked and passengers can share their route in real time with family or friends, as well as rate their drivers at the end of each trip (and vice versa). This is on top of a robust system of background checks. 
 
 Sadly, no means of transportation is 100 percent safe today. Accidents and incidents do happen. It’s why we are working to build an exceptional customer support team that can handle problems when they occur, including working with law enforcement. 
 
 You asked about screenshots in your possession (and since published) showing that if a customer service representative types “rape” or “sexual assault” into our database, they will see more than 5,800 results (i.e. customer support tickets) for rape and 6,160 for sexual assault over a period of three years. These results are highly misleading because: 
 
 Riders routinely misspell “rate” (as in the fare) as “rape”, or use the word “rape” in another context. For example, “you raped my wallet”; 
 
 Any email address or rider/driver last name that contains the letters R, A, P, E consecutively (for example, Don Draper) are included. After analyzing the data, we found more than 11,000 rider names and 17,500 rider emails with the letters “rape”; 
 
 The results also showed tickets from passengers who got into cars not on the Uber platform, or who were discussing unsubstantiated media reports of sexual assaults. 
 
 Our analysis for all of these results shows five tickets that allege an actual rape occurred (0.0000009% of rides in the three years from December 2012 to August 2015) and 170 tickets with a legitimate claim of sexual assault (1 in every 3.3 million trips). Bear in mind that when serious incidents occur, people often report them directly to law enforcement. Therefore, those incidents may not be reflected in the numbers above. 
 
 When serious incidents are reported to us, we always reach out to the person who filed the report and, where appropriate, engage with law enforcement. We also temporarily suspend the driver or rider (if it is a question of violence by a passenger) during the investigation. 
 
 You asked to have one of your reporters sit with Uber’s customer service team so they could review these types of tickets and validate our numbers. It is entirely fair to ask questions of Uber -- it is the purpose of a free press. But it is unfair to suggest that you cannot trust the veracity of the numbers Uber has provided without personally verifying them, which would be a serious breach of our riders’ and drivers’ privacy. 
 
 In addition, you have asked if this is the first time we have audited the data behind the screenshots in your possession. Because of the flaws highlighted above, we do manual audits of every ticket sent to Uber, not audits of key words. It’s why it took us more than two days to answer your questions in detail. It is entirely untrue to conclude that we do not audit safety on our platform. We do, regularly. As we said earlier, our Trust and Safety team is measured internally on one metric: whether it has cut safety incidents on our platform. 
 
 Finally, you asked yesterday if Uber had contacted customer service representatives who had recently queried the terms “rape” and “sexual assault” in our database. The answer is yes. We are unsurprisingly concerned that sensitive, personal and confidential data has been shared with people outside Uber. We believe that any company in a similar situation would do exactly the same. 
 
 Uber is a relatively young company and we’re the first to admit that we haven’t always gotten things right. But we are working hard to ensure passengers everywhere can get a safe, reliable ride, as well as to provide great customer service when things go wrong. It’s a shame that your article does not reflect much of the substance we have provided. 
 
 Sincerely, 
 
 Joe Sullivan, Chief Safety Officer 
 
 
 
 Jill Hazelbaker, Vice President, Communications & Public Policy 
 
 
 
 Tim Collins, Vice President, Global Support ||||| BuzzFeed News obtained internal data on rapes and sexual assaults lodged via Uber's customer service system, as the company attempted to find the leaker. 
 
 According to data provided by Uber to BuzzFeed News, the company received five claims of rape and "fewer than" 170 claims of sexual assault directly related to an Uber ride as inbound tickets to its customer service database between December 2012 and August 2015. 
 
 Uber provided these numbers as a rebuttal to screenshots obtained by BuzzFeed News. The images that were provided by a former Uber customer service representative (CSR) to BuzzFeed News, and subsequently confirmed by multiple other parties, show search queries conducted on Uber's Zendesk customer support platform from December 2012 through August 2015. Several individual tickets shown in the screenshots have also been confirmed. After Uber learned of BuzzFeed's investigation, the company began contacting customer service representatives in its system who had searched the Zendesk database for the terms rape and sexual assault, apparently in a hunt for the leaker. 
 
 In one screenshot, a search query for "sexual assault" returns 6,160 Uber customer support tickets. A search for "rape" returns 5,827 individual tickets. Other variations of the terms yield similarly high returns: A search for "assaulted" shows 3,524 tickets, while "sexually assaulted" returns 382 results. 
 
 
 
 
 
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 Uber insists the data shown in these images is not an accurate representation of assault complaints made through its platform. Though the company said it could not immediately provide internal statistics for the numbers of rape and sexual assault complaints on its platform, a 24-hour review by Uber's legal, safety, and data teams concluded that the rape ticket counts obtained by BuzzFeed News are "significantly overstated." 
 
 Uber officials told BuzzFeed News that of these thousands of tickets returned for the keyword "rape," five meet Uber's standard of an actual incident related to a trip; Uber declined to further define this standard or expose its methodology. (It's worth noting these are incidents in its customer service system, not an accounting of all incidents. The number is neither comprehensive nor inclusive). The company suggested a number of reasons a search query for the term would return 5,827 support tickets. Uber officials suggested that if an email address or rider/driver last name contains the word “rape” like “Jason Rape” or “Don Draper” it will be included when queried. The official noted that 68 riders and 12 drivers have the first or last name “Rape” and claimed that many of them generated multiple tickets during the time period in question. The source also suggested that misspellings of the word "rate" and expressions like "you raped my wallet" accounted for false positives in the search results seen in the obtained screenshots. 
 
 However the screenshots obtained by BuzzFeed News show nine complaint tickets with the subject line of "rape." The nine results in the screenshot do not appear to be the result of misspellings or driver or rider names or emails with a letter sequence of "rape." The ride-hail giant repeatedly asserted that the high number of queries from the screenshots is overstated, however Uber declined BuzzFeed News' request to grant direct access to the data, or view its data analysis procedures. When asked for any additional anonymous data on the five rape complaint tickets it claims to have received between December 2012 and August 2015, Uber declined to provide any information. Uber also rebutted screenshots that show a search query for "sexual assault" returning 6,160 customer support tickets. Uber officials told BuzzFeed News there were fewer than 170 tickets with a claim of sexual assault. These officials suggested that the thousands of tickets matching that search query may have been caused by "reports from riders who were making claims about sexual assault on other transport services, discussions about sexual assaults in the news, and reports about passengers who got into cars that were not Uber vehicles and were then sexually assaulted." The screenshots obtained by BuzzFeed News show at least nine complaint tickets with the subject line of "sexual assault" and at least nine results out of 382 with subjects for "sexually assaulted," including "uber driver sexually assaulted me," "sexually assaulted by Uber driver in SF," "Uber driver sexually assaulted my girlfriend," and "my daughter sexually assaulted by drive." 
 
 Uber officials told BuzzFeed News that, in the instance of reported rape or assault, CSRs are told to reach out to the person who reported the claim and to escalate to law enforcement as appropriate. Company officials also noted that Uber temporarily deactivates the driver partner or rider during the investigation and that Uber's technology sends riders the license plate, make, and color of the car, and the driver's photo and name. Additional screenshots provided to BuzzFeed News detail the way Uber’s Incident Response Teams are instructed to deal with customer support tickets, which range in severity from Level 1 to Level 4. Nonconsensual sexual contact (or attempts to commit same) fall under Level 3, and are supposed to prompt an investigation. According to Uber's internal documentation, if an investigation into nonconsensual sexual contact proves inconclusive, a driver receives a “Final Warning”; only if the investigation is conclusive or if the driver receives a second inconclusive strike is he or she deactivated. Screenshots from Uber’s “Support Logic and Escalations” section inside Zendesk also show that customer service reps handling nonconsensual sexual contact cases should take media and law enforcement interest into account when deciding to escalate cases to higher-ranking employees. “Determine LE/media interest and have Comms/LERT monitor if risk confirmed,” one screenshot reads. 
 
 In another customer service screenshot pertaining to confirmed driver alcohol/drug use, support logic instructions suggest that "if rider does not want to escalate with LE (law enforcement) or media, follow strike system, issue warning, and resolve without escalating." 
 
 
 
 While the volume of search returns for tickets concerning rape and sexual assault in the screenshots above differ greatly from the numbers Uber provided to BuzzFeed News to rebut them, the high volume of queries under these two keywords provides a window into a particularly vexing problem for customer support representatives already struggling to handle a myriad of rider and driver issues. Simply put: The sheer quantity of these tickets makes it difficult to tell which ones are exaggerations or attempts at false escalations and which are legitimate and urgent requests. An Uber spokesperson told BuzzFeed News, "we are deeply committed to providing a ride people can trust, and our technology allows us to focus on safety before, during, and after every trip. Even one incident of this nature is one too many." 
 
 
 
 
 
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 Charlie Warzel is a senior writer for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. Warzel reports on and writes about the intersection of tech and culture. Contact Charlie Warzel at charlie.warzel@buzzfeed.com. Johana Bhuiyan is a tech reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. Bhuiyan reports on the sharing economy with a focus on ridesharing companies. Contact Johana Bhuiyan at johana.bhuiyan@buzzfeed.com. Got a confidential tip? Submit it here. 
 
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– Between December 2012 and August 2015, Uber received five claims of rape and fewer than 170 claims of sexual assault stemming from an Uber ride, according to data the company provided to BuzzFeed. Those numbers differ greatly from those reflected in screenshots from Uber's Zendesk customer support platform that were obtained by BuzzFeed. Those images, which BuzzFeed says were provided by a former Uber customer service rep and confirmed by other parties, show 6,160 results for a search for "sexual assault" and 5,827 results for "rape." In a response to the BuzzFeed piece, Uber calls those search results "highly misleading," saying, for instance, riders may misspell "rate" or use the term "rape" out of context. Also, any word with the letters R-A-P-E in consecutive order will return a result for the search term "rape" (e.g., the name "Don Draper"). To that, BuzzFeed says the screenshots it obtained show nine complaint tickets with the subject "rape" that do not appear to be misspellings, names, or email addresses. As for "sexual assault," Uber tells BuzzFeed the high-volume query results on the obtained screenshots could be the result of riders making claims of assault on other transport services and discussions about sexual assaults in the news, among other things. In response to allegations of sexual assault, Uber tells BuzzFeed that its customer service reps are told to follow up with the person making the claim, and then report it to law enforcement if appropriate. The driver is temporarily deactivated during the investigation. If the investigation is inconclusive, the driver gets a warning and goes back to work. After two inconclusive investigations, a driver is permanently deactivated. While the data provided by Uber doesn't jibe with the screenshots, BuzzFeed notes, "The sheer quantity of these tickets makes it difficult to tell which ones are exaggerations or attempts at false escalations and which are legitimate and urgent requests."