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To perceive Priscila Barbosa – courage, ambition, balls – we get down to work with the airport. We got down to work at the exact moment, on April 24, 2018, when it concluded, I’m screwed.
Barbosa, just outside customs at New York’s JFK International Airport, standing at 1. 70 meters tall, archetypically quite uniform without his favorite Instagram filter. She walked past two rolling suitcases full of clothes and Brazilian bikinis and not much else. The acquaintance who had invited her to come from Brazil on a tourist visa, who will take her to Boston?The one who promised to help her settle in, claiming she could make a lot of money like him, driving for Uber and Lyft?
He responds to her text messages.
Barbossa was blocked. She cried. She took an inventory of her belongings: suitcases, her iPhone, $117 not just in her wallet, but in total. She called her mother in Brazil, but she already knew her family might not have a return ticket. There was no way she was going to ask her friends, who had doubted this plan from the beginning; One of them said that she was too old to start over in a new country and, with a touch of elegance, she implied that emigrating was not something her social circle really did.
And now?
Well, Barbosa has a phoenix tattooed on his back. It gives a sense of joy: what can I say yes to today?The kind of user who, when she and her boyfriend don’t need to splurge on a fancy hotel with a girl, caters to all the guys on Tinder until one of them joins her pub, moves slowly, and invites them to sleep on her boat. (A friend says, “Priscilla is crazy. “) Someday the U. S. government will be able to rebuild the U. S. government. The U. S. would put it more grandly, speaking of Barbosa’s “unique social talents,” calling her “hardworking,” “productive,” and “highly organized. “
I knew that I would not return to Brazil but also, deep down, that I did not need to, that this opportunity was there. “I enjoyed this place,” United States, from the moment he stepped off the plane. Says. He was 32 years old, college-educated, and spoke decent English. I still had no choice to get out of this mess.
Barbosa may not have simply predicted where his efforts would end up: that he would be the heavy head of a fraud ring. That would publicize the shameful blind spot of the informal work economy. That one day, multi-billion dollar corporations like Uber and DoorDash would mourn victims. His victim. Or that he would fall so low, or that his relationship with Uncle Sam would be so deeply twisted and codified.
That day at JFK airport, she knew her skeptics in Brazil would only see one plot on Instagram: Priscilla’s march to victory. As he took a $10 Lyft to a bus station, his eyes still swollen from the scream at the airport, Barbosa pointed his iPhone at the traffic speeding across the Throgs Neck Bridge on a clear spring day. He tagged the video “New York, New York” and uploaded it to his story, promising that he was headed to a wonderful place.
In real life, Barbossa is frank (“I am a bad liar”). She drops the self-deprecating jokes and we let out big abnormal laughs that sound like a car about to start. She grew up in Sorocaba, a commercial city of 723,000 people located about two hours west of São Paulo. Her father is her electrician, her mother is her pursewoman. They put her eldest daughter on the path to “becoming a very knowledgeable and well-mannered person”: English classes and ballet classes. Barbossa liked to play with computers. When she was a teenager, she gave her home PC a terabyte of memory and an Nvidia processor so she could play Counter-Strike and World of Warcraft. She also frequented a local internet cafe, where she and a few other players formed a tournament team called BR Girls (“BR” for Brazil). Off screen, the best school is miserable. She was bullied for being a teacher’s pet, for being “fat,” for being bad at sports. When some boys showed romantic interest in her, she rejected them for fear that it was a joke.
Barbosa studied computer science at a local university, taught computer science in elementary schools, and digitized records in the city’s fitness department. She has also become a gym enthusiast (“I’ve had to fight all my life to have the best body. “) and started cooking fitness recipes. In 2013, she turned this hobby into a part-time activity, a meal delivery service for her in a position. When orders skyrocketed, Barbosa switched to full-time in 2015, calling his company Fit Express. He hired nine workers and appeared on the front page of the local press. He earned enough to travel to Walt Disney World, party at music festivals, and buy and trade bitcoins. She was satisfied to believe in opening franchises and building herself firmly in the upper middle class. class.
But Brazil, in the midst of a recession, and after a few years, its consumers began to disappear. In an attempt to stay afloat, Barbosa cashed in his bitcoin and, since that wasn’t enough, took out high-interest loans (“What a stupid idea, by the way”). A younger sister had just finished college, and her parents had lost their bakery, their retirement job. Barbosa felt that it was up to her to get everyone out.
She texted this Boston-area acquaintance to express her desperation and he replied, “Why didn’t you move to the U. S. ?”And did you drive for Uber and Lyft? He sent her screenshots of what he earned: $250 a day, more than a lawyer’s money. Brazil. He said other undocumented people can live as ordinary citizens. She already had a tourist visa. With his family circle broken and his task of looking to go nowhere, “I saw no other option,” he says.
The first in the shelter, Barbosa slept on the floor. The second, an air mattress from Walmart.
A one-way ticket to JFK costs about $900. He sold a ring of his grandfather’s for $1,000. At the airport, his father tried to calm the family’s sadness by saying, “Go out and buy Dad a Mustang!”
After a flight across the equator, and past the momentary collapse of JFK airport, Barbosa hurried north from New York to Boston aboard a Peter Pan bus, fervently navigating Facebook teams engaged with Massachusetts’ gigantic Brazilian community, calling direct messages and dialing numbers. The owner of a Brazilian pizzeria told him to come check the product the next day. A Brazilian landlord, who owns a small room in a seedy hostel in the western suburb of Framingham, said he would settle for the $400 rent once Barbosa paid. A call in the dark: a Brazilian from Boston whom he had met years earlier during a vacation in Miami. Miraculously, he not only answered her, but found her at the Gare du Sud, let her spend the night, and took her away the next morning. to the pizzeria, where he passed the cooking test.
The first night at the shelter, Barbosa slept on the floor. The second, on a Walmart air mattress. He slipped magazines under the door to keep the rats away (“Gross!”). Without a car, he walked an hour to the pizzeria, beyond buying groceries and Brazilian bakeries. On the way, he would stop at Planet Fitness to lift weights and take a shower. (He congratulated himself on the side effect of all those survival efforts: “The thinnest I’ve ever had!”)
Barbosa earned about $800 a week at the pizzeria. In an effort to pay off her debts and temporarily build her new life, she looked for a second part-time job. A guy at a restaurant told her he needed her to have a social business. Security number and gave him the number of a guy who might just make documents with fake paintings, but Barbosa didn’t dare call. “When you get here,” he explains, “you think ICE will be waiting for you around every corner. “and each and every corner. ” He tried to empty the houses, but it lasted exactly two days, hating each and every moment. Then the pizzeria was delayed for the summer and fired her. One morning, while browsing Facebook on In Bed, he saw a message at a Brazilian company asking: Do you want to work for Uber/Lyft and be your own boss?
Barbosa enjoyed being his own boss. Working for other people since his arrival in the United States had seemed like a mandatory but fundamental downgrade. She, despite everything, also had a car, after financing a used Jeep Liberty after a few months of work. When he called the Indexed number in the ad, the respondent told him that for $250 a week, he could simply sign up for an Uber driver account. It would include Barbosa’s photo, his car, and his bank account, but he would use another name. Barbosa yes Don’t ask any questions. She says she wasn’t sure exactly how she skipped the app’s onboarding requirements: a U. S. driver’s license and a U. S. driver’s license. One year of U. S. driving experience. You can find a U. S. Social Security number, and a background check. He knew he had made $2,000 in his first week. enough to avoid worrying about some other job.
Shortly after it started, Uber deactivated Barbosa’s account out of the blue, so he hired one on Lyft of the same type. Now she was driving under the name “Shakira”. When the Lyft app asked Barbosa to verify his identity by scanning his license, he texted the guy he was hiring with: What’s next?He sent her a passport photo of Shakira. Oh, it was real. He paid Shakira a payment every week.
Driving without a license, under the table on a tourist visa, has stressed Barbosa out. One night, Barbosa picked up a passenger at 2 a. m. and he tried to kiss her. She had to fight him and left him as a star on the app. ; He didn’t need to threaten to call the police. On another occasion, she was arrested because her lights were off. Barbosa froze as the officer approached her window, fearing that her car would be towed and she would end up in jail, or even, who knows?He showed the policeman his Brazilian driver’s license and said he had left his U. S. license at home. He let her go.
On WhatsApp devices and while waiting for passengers at Logan Airport, Barbosa chatted with other Brazilian drivers who also sign up for accounts. They exchanged recommendations on undocumented driving, the nuances of the unclear prestige quo in a country that has not enacted comprehensive immigration reforms in more than 3 decades. Far from being an ICE officer on any and all corners, he heard, if you kept your head down, if you didn’t drink, drive, or fight, you might get away with it.
In October, Barbosa posted a humble message on Instagram to commemorate her six months in the United States: “I am grateful every day for having so much courage and audacity. She had an explanation for why she was proud: After being left with $117 at JFK airport, she had moved to a larger apartment and had already sent enough cash to Brazil to pay for her parents’ expenses and nearly erase her own debts. at TJ Maxx, fragrance at Macy’s, she restarted her regimen of technicolor manicures and anti-wrinkle Botox (“a priority”). In another Instagram photo, she held her cocktail in the air and danced with a giant furry bear in a club, kissing toward the camera. The message quoted Apple’s iconic ad: “To all the madmen, the misfits, the rebels. . . “
The sixth anniversary also meant Barbosa officially extended the duration of his tourist visa. The paintings continued. He painted 14-hour days at Uber. He paid a middleman just to use an account. Then, that fall, Barbosa discovered a way out.
One of his customers left his wallet in his car. She followed the woman’s complicated orders to return her, driving to two remote locations for two hours. Annoyed, Barbosa opened his wallet at some point. He looked at the woman’s license, blonde with blue eyes. Barbosa took a photograph. She thought the woman might just tip him or at least say “thank you” for spending two hours, without pay, to do him a favor. Instead, the woman, impolite and small, gave Barbosa the flavor he was looking for. “I said, yes, now I’m going to use this. “
Over the next few weeks, I would go through the driver onboarding procedure at Uber and Lyft, reading through the steps to create your own account, thinking about the risk. Finally, mendacity in bed on Christmas Eve, the first he had spent without it. Family, it’s time: She opened her phone and scrolled down to the blonde woman’s driver’s license. Barbosa downloaded the license into the Uber app. He used the woman’s call but his own insurance and registration of her. She entered her own email and iCloud phone number and put her own photo (brown hair, brown eyes) on the driver’s profile. She dialed a Social Security number, applied, and fell asleep.
The next day, Uber approved the account. Thus, Barbosa runs for herself.
“I love to party,” Barbosa wrote to me during the year and part that we have been talking and sending emails. For her, dating is less of a joke and more of a birthright, Barbosa’s incredibly outgoing brand of self-care. “I’m a human being too,” he says, “I deserve to have fun. “
On Friday, as other drivers shared their earnings in the WhatsApp group, she posted a photo of her new pineapple vodka cocktail and invited them to sign up for it at the satisfied hour. Barbosa went to bars and clubs several nights a week, the Grand, the Scorpion Bar, the Harp, the Ned Devine’s, Royale. . . and host parties in your apartment. He liked to meet other Brazilians (“I hate being alone”), plug their numbers into his phone, and ask them what they did during a job.
A few weeks without incident after Barbosa started driving with the Uber account he had created, a new business opportunity arose. An acquaintance asked Barbosa to locate a tenant for his Uber and Lyft accounts, which he didn’t use. (Some undocumented drivers traveled to (Barbosa would soon get his own license, a friend’s in California. ) He saw a candidate and the acquaintance gave him a discount on the job, $50 a week. He soon did the same with a few other people he knew who also wanted to rent out their accounts, a popular activity among expats, he soon realized. That’s it, $300 in passive income per week.
Barbosa readily admits that he enjoyed the boost of his ego by beating the tough corporations of Silicon Valley on their own platforms. “I’m proud to break your stupid systems,” she wrote to me.
One day, while chatting over Mike’s fried fish and strong lemonade at one of his space parties, a friend remarked that, for some reason, the rideshare account onboarding procedure couldn’t determine Social Security numbers issued after June 2011, when the Social Security Administration replaced the way it assigned numbers.
After the banquet, Barbosa may not resist; He entered some random sequences into ssn-ascertain. com, an online page that indicates when a number was issued. He attempted one that began with 776-94. Bingo. Possibly awarded after 2011. He entered the mix creating a new driving force account. When Checkr, a company that conducts background checks at Uber, emailed him asking him to determine the number, Barbosa says he simply reconnected him. Checkr then sent all the accumulated data to Uber, and Uber approved the (A source close to Checkr insists that the company can, in fact, conduct background checks on the numbers assigned after 2011, and that Social Security numbers are just one of the sources of information they use to locate data. All Barbosa knows is that this time, he worked on his trick. )
Barbosa also met others with photographs of genuine licenses for sale and saw another opportunity: By purchasing a license and adding his undeniable Social Security tip, Barbosa could create new driver accounts on Uber and Lyft in droves. I hired for the value I had paid before, which is $250 per week. Business took off. The news spread; More and more people called him on WhatsApp, in the absence of having his own profile. At the end of the summer, when 8 tenants were earning him $2,000 a week, Barbosa stopped driving. Now he spent his days at his dining table. on his laptop, making up accounts.
“It never happened to me that he was a criminal,” Barbosa says.
Barbosa helps keep the gray shoes and sweatshirts he wore in prison.
While incarcerated, she engaged in crocheting, among other hobbies.
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