South Florida’s Walmart gig drivers feud over deliveries, say they’re losing money to bots and cheats

Shira Moolten, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
·9 min read

Delivery app workers for Walmart stores throughout South Florida have become embroiled in a bitter feud with other drivers who they say are using fake accounts and bots to grab the best orders while claiming certain parking lots as their turf.

A small group of the gig workers rallied outside of the Walmart on Broward Boulevard in downtown Fort Lauderdale Tuesday morning, demanding that the company take action against the “scammers.”

Many of the workers are immigrants who rely on the app, known as Spark, for their livelihoods and to support their families. They spoke of incomes reduced by half, harassment and threats from other workers, and hours spent in hot parking lots, waiting for orders.

“You wake up and you have to go and see what you have to deal with,” said Marcos Fisboin, 71, one of the protesters. “All those scams and fake accounts … and Walmart doesn’t do anything.”

Walmart said in a statement Tuesday that it has taken specific action to prevent and investigate bots at South Florida stores, but the problem is constantly evolving.

“We want everyone to have a great experience on the Spark Driver platform,” the statement said. “The use of bots is an industry-wide issue and something we take seriously. Using bots on the Spark Driver platform is against the terms of use, and we investigate reports of specific driver bot use and deactivate drivers who are misusing the platform in this way. We take a proactive and comprehensive approach to identifying and preventing the use of bots on the platform.”

The situation is not specific to Spark or South Florida. Delivery app workers at other companies, such as Amazon Flex and Instacart, also have complained of income losses attributed to fellow workers using various creative methods to snatch up the best orders. Instacart workers, for example, told the Seattle Times that they have begun losing to bots that take the best “batches.”

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The Spark workers previously held a protest in Chicago, where workers raised the same concerns. In Florida, workers in Orlando and Jacksonville have witnessed the same phenomenon, according to Lenny Sanchez, a national spokesperson for Justice for App Workers, which represents delivery drivers for Spark as well as Uber and Lyft, and helped organize the South Florida and Chicago protests.

“Workers’ earnings have significantly plummeted” in South Florida and throughout the country, said Sanchez. “They’re alarming, the same hours they used to put in, and what they make.”

Justice for App Workers represents a little over 100,000 workers, about 500 to 1,000 of whom drive for Spark. Many of the workers are afraid to come forward because of their immigration status, Sanchez added.

In South Florida, the Spark workers want Walmart to put safeguards in place to prevent people from creating accounts with fake identities, stop bots from claiming orders, and prevent other workers from intimidating and harassing them. They say that they raised the issue with upper level management several times, but nothing was done.

The Walmart statement said that the company had looked into specific stores in South Florida.

“We have been in touch with the stores in these areas and investigated specific reports of bot usage according to our usual processes,” the statement said. “We encourage drivers on the Spark Driver platform to report any suspicious activity, including the use of bots. Bot services constantly evolve, so it takes a consistent and ongoing approach to combat this activity.”

The automated gig economy has lent itself to a cat-and-mouse game where contract workers, most of whom lack job stability and benefits, look for new ways to earn while companies try to crack down on them.

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Sanchez said he spent hours sitting outside a store in Chicago, watching some delivery workers juggle upwards of 20 phones. Many times workers will create multiple fake accounts to receive more orders; other times they will pay someone just to stand close to the business, within the “geofence,” to grab orders on their phones and then dole them out, he said.

Online, Spark workers spoke of drivers standing outside stores with phones attached to selfie sticks so that their locations would appear as close as possible. Some news outlets have reported Amazon drivers hanging phones from trees.

Walmart has taken some steps to crack down on various cheats in the Spark app; a company spokesperson pointed to a recent post on the company website that announces steps to verify users’ identities using selfies and facial recognition. Sanchez said that Spark had recently rolled out the feature in some markets, including Chicago and parts of Florida. Already, workers in those areas have noticed a substantial increase in income, he said.

But in South Florida, workers have not seen that change. One of the protesters on Tuesday, Jessica Vera, says her income dropped from over a thousand dollars a week to about five or six hundred in recent months.

“We want fairness!” she shouted Tuesday. “We’re tired of the injustice!”

Since 2022, she has sent complaints and follow-up emails about fake identities, GPS spoofing and bots to Walmart management and agencies including the Federal Trade Commission, the Office of the Inspector General, and the Florida Attorney General’s Office, but says she has not received a resolution on any of them.

Some of her complaints ask the company to look into specific stores in Hollywood, North Miami Beach and Miami Gardens, as well as workers who she says are using fake accounts.

“We received your report about the driver using bots, modulators and Apps to manipulate the App so they can get more offers and shopping offers,” a Walmart employee said in response to one of her emails. “We are sorry for this inconvenience, we understand the importance of this, and we are glad to help you.”

For some workers who started out on the conventional path, the possibility of earning more gave way to necessity as they realized were losing money. A divide emerged between the two groups of workers that has often turned hostile.

“At one point we were all friends,” said Vera, a Pembroke Pines resident who became aware of the situation a year ago. She said that she had even helped one of the workers bring his family to South Florida from Venezuela before she realized that he was using the alleged bots.

Vera and fellow workers described waiting outside store parking lots for a single order while watching others collect several at once.

“You watch them going in and out, in and out, in and out, and you’re just sitting there outside,” she said. “And then when you do get an order it’s seven dollars for 10 miles. No, we’re not gonna do that, it’s a disrespect, it’s disrespectful.”

The sale of the bots has become a full-fledged industry of its own, Sanchez said.

“Scammers” will approach workers in parking lots, he said, showing them that they have earned in the thousands each week to entice them to sign up. In exchange for the bot, they are told to pay an initial fee of $150, then $50 per week. The sellers will forbid those who don’t buy the bots from accepting orders at certain stores.

Some people make an entire living just off of having workers pay them for access to bots, Sanchez said.

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At this point, he believes that close to half of Spark app workers are using bots, fake accounts, or both. It has become so entrenched, he said, that Justice for App Workers expelled one of its local leaders and an entire group of workers because they were doing so.

In South Florida, some workers have begun claiming certain Walmart stores as their turf, protesters said Tuesday, threatening those who don’t pay for bots to stay away.

One of the workers, Alexis Ron, shared a text he received: “Hey bastard!” it began. “It’s a pity that you can’t work in this pompano zone anymore especially Walmart 2946, start looking for another zone that is not pompano or you will lose this account.”

“It’s a mafia that’s growing,” Ron said in Spanish. “They have taken over the store.”

Online, in the Spark subreddit, users argue over whether the bots are real or just an excuse made by workers bitter about the quality of their orders. Some say that the drivers snagging more orders are just working harder, and the people advertising bots are really just advertising apps that steal people’s information.

It is certainly possible that people could be downloading what they think is a bot when it’s actually a phishing scam, said Charles Grau, Chief Innovation Officer at Nova Southeastern University’s Levan Center.

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Sanchez and the workers say they are sure the bots are real from watching and speaking to the workers who use them. But they don’t have firsthand experience because they rejected those offers themselves.

The technology is certainly there for the bots, experts say, whether workers are using bots that snag orders or location spoofing that makes the app think they are closer than they actually are.

The programs basically communicate with a “host system,” performing a query looking for delivery availability, said Grau.

But there are several things Walmart could do to make things more secure, he said, including preventing multiple queries from the same IP address and requiring people to pass CAPTCHAs — challenge-response tests — that bots would fail.

Amazon Flex has also encountered workers using bots to schedule “blocks” or time slots where they deliver orders. The company has instituted photo verification in 2019 and CAPTCHAs earlier this year to try to stop them, an Amazon spokesperson said.

App companies need to be slower to market, Grau added, to make sure that they can withstand these security issues ahead of time. Ultimately, he thinks it will hurt Walmart if employees decide they’re fed up.

“If you have drivers who don’t believe in the app, what it can do, and are signing up for services, then you’re not going to have that gig base of employees that you can pull from,” Grau said.

Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity and public policy lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Business, said that he thinks the protesters’ sentiments are misplaced. They should be angry at Walmart for not paying them enough or giving them benefits, not at fellow gig workers “using various hacks to try and get some autonomy back,” he said.

“If the only way you can survive is to cheat,” he said, “those who aren’t willing to cheat, don’t have beef with the cheater, have a beef with the corporate power that is making cheating the only option to survive.”

Even with safeguards in place, the pattern will likely continue. Already, in Chicago, Sanchez said, he has seen workers with new, better bots join the fray, while workers who used older bots say they can no longer make any money.

“The reality is, it doesn’t matter what the app is, there’s always going to be somebody who finds some glitch or weakness to exploit,” he said. “This is just a new wave of hustling.”