Sources: FBI is investigating Uber over use of defunct “Hell” program that illegally tracked drivers working for competitors like Lyft
Investigators looking at whether Uber's defunct ‘Hell’ internal program was used to interfere illegally with competitors
Context & Ripple Effects
Uber's internal tooling is now under parallel criminal scrutiny. After The Information revealed in April that Hell used fake Lyft rider accounts to track Lyft drivers' locations, and after the Justice Department opened a criminal probe into Greyball, the software Uber built to identify and stonewall enforcement officers, the FBI's investigation extends federal interest from regulator evasion to interference with competitors.
The pattern across the coverage is consistent: programs built inside Uber to gain an information edge — over regulators in the Greyball case, over Lyft through Hell — are being re-examined as potential crimes rather than competitive tactics, with a later Washington Post report on the Special Investigations Unit suggesting internal oversight repeatedly favored Uber's interests.
First-order effects
- Uber faces a second active federal criminal investigation alongside the Justice Department's Greyball probe, raising its legal exposure on two fronts at once.
- Lyft, whose driver supply was the direct target of Hell's fake-rider tracking, gains a federal record documenting competitor interference against it.
Second-order effects
- Ride-hailing rivals can now point to documented surveillance of their driver networks when pressing for data-sharing restrictions or contractual protections against platform-to-platform poaching tools.
- Investors and partners must price Uber as a company whose internal engineering culture is itself a regulatory liability, compounding the reputational cost already attached to Greyball.
Third-order effects
- If both probes establish that covert platform tooling crossed into criminal conduct, ride-hailing platforms face a structural shift toward external auditability of internal data systems — the same accountability gap the Special Investigations Unit reporting exposed internally.
- The Greyball and Hell cases together set a template for how regulators treat anti-enforcement and anti-competitive software as prosecutable acts rather than gray-area growth tactics, a precedent that would apply to any platform operating dual-use internal tools.
The trend: Federal investigators are converting Uber's secret internal programs from competitive weapons into criminal case files, marking a shift where platform data practices face law-enforcement scrutiny rather than just press exposure.