Is this my favorite Lauren Smiley story ever? It's certainly one of her best-written, which is saying something, since she's turned in some real (and award-winning) bangers over the years. (If you don't know Lauren: Where've you been? She's one of the foremost documenters of tech's human dramas.) There's just something looser about her style here, a spiritedness to the storytelling. I mean, the phrases "sheer balls" and "I'm fucked" appear in the first paragraph alone.
Perhaps her subject inspired her—the (indeed highly spirited) Priscila Barbosa. Back in 2022, while Priscila was serving out a three-year prison sentence for defrauding apps like Uber and Instacart of hundreds of thousands of dollars, Lauren—duly impressed—sent her a letter. A few weeks later, Priscila called her. Yes, she'd be willing to talk. Would be HAPPY to, in fact. She didn't just want to be a name on a DOJ press release. She had a story. She had dreams. She "loooved," she wrote, "to party."
And party she had, of course, for years, raking in upwards of $10,000 a month as she rented out fake rideshare accounts to her fellow undocumented immigrants in need of work. Her story begins at a US airport. She's fresh from Brazil. She's crying. What follows from there is a twisty, unbelievable tale, the kind a friendly Uber driver might dazzle you with, late one night, before disappearing back into the world …
