Taken for a ride: Woman gets $15,000 Uber bill

For $15,000, you could fly business class from New York to London, make a down payment on a Tesla — or you could take an Uber 10 km from Brooklyn to Manhattan.

Gothamist reports that one unlucky Uber rider received an email that the company attempted to charge her $16,000, somehow took care of $4,000, and she had an unpaid balance of $15,000.

Yes, for one Uber ride.

On March 28, Jaime Hessel booked an UberX taxi from her Brooklyn apartment to a bar about 10km away for a cancer fundraising event - a 35-minute ride.

Ms Hessel said when the driver arrived he seemed distracted and fumbled with his GPS for a few minutes. When they  finally did depart, the driver appeared to get lost.

“I’m paying attention to his GPS, and I’m very familiar with the area, and I see him go right by McGuinness, and I’m really curious how he’s going to get to 50th Street,” she told Gothamist, estimating that one missed turn her driver took tacked an extra seven minutes onto the trip.

Ms Hessel was initially charged US$56.40 for the trip, which she immediately contested. Uber acknowledged the error and said her account would be credited US$15.

However, on Monday she noticed she hadn’t been refunded yet — the credit card that Uber had on file expired at the beginning of the month, and she hadn’t updated it yet, she said.

"I received two e-mails yesterday. One about the status of my credit saying it should be there, it's been processed," she told Gothamist.

"And then a second e-mail saying they are trying to charge me $16,000, but then $4,000 had already been taken care of, so I owed them $12,000. "

The good news is that the email never actually resulted in any kind of charge for the ride, which should have cost Ms Hessel only $41.

An Uber spokesman said: "We apologise to this rider for any inconvenience and we have provided them with a full refund."