Distracted by her burgeoning delivery app business, Barbosa mostly stopped thinking about Uber and Social Security numbers. Then Covid struck and cratered ride-sharing overnight.
A mother lode of food delivery surged in its place. DoorDash and Instacart cranked up their referral bonuses to lure more drivers to the road. At one point, she recalls, it was $2,000 on DoorDash, $2,500 on Instacart. Immigrants ineligible for unemployment or Covid relief texted Barbosa with a new level of desperation. They needed to make rent, to feed their kids. Now she was hearing from Brazilians all over the United States. Spanish-speaking immigrants too. Even some US citizens who couldn’t drive because of DUIs or reckless driving tickets.
Barbosa went into overdrive, churning out accounts “as fast as I could.” For friends, or people whose situations sounded especially grim, she’d sometimes make them for free.
On Instacart, she’d scan the front of her own California license, so she could then take a selfie to pass the platform’s face-recognition test. She says she did this on hundreds of accounts. For the license’s backside, she photoshopped on a barcode that she generated with software, using the identity information from her existing stockpile of drivers’ IDs. When she needed more licenses, she bought fresh ones off Instacart workers who were using a new harvesting technique: While scanning the back of a customer’s ID into the app during alcohol deliveries, the worker would sneak a photo of the front.
On DoorDash, a few zealous drivers were nabbing the referral bonus in a single day and coming back the next day for another account. Sometimes, Barbosa had up to 20 new accounts on various platforms going through background checks; at her Covid apex, she says, she raked in about $15,000 in one week.
Barbosa—always a “materialist,” she concedes—catapulted to a new realm of buying power. She flaunted her acquisitions on Instagram: a Sea-Doo ($7,000, used), Louboutin heels, Gucci sunglasses, a Louis Vuitton purse. She upgraded her cross necklace to a 24k gold one with 18 inset diamonds (not religious, just superstitious), and her bed to a California king. With most clubs shuttered, Barbosa outfitted her latest rental upgrade, a three-story townhome in Saugus, with a karaoke machine and a keg tap, plus a hot tub and a firepit in the backyard. She adopted a Yorkie named Bailey, for whom she bought so many toys that house visitors asked whether she had kids (no, and no thanks). She posted an Instagram Story that someone had filmed of her standing out of the sunroof of her gleaming white Porsche Macan, hair whipping. (For extra money, she rented out the Porsche and her Mustang on Turo.) She dropped $13,000 to rent an event hall in the Boston burbs for her 35th birthday bash, with a band and 50 guests. The next day, she was awed but not stressed by an additional $12,000 charge on her credit card for the open bar. She bought a plot of land outside of Fort Myers, Florida, that she saw advertised on Facebook for $5,000. (“I’m like, that’s so cheap!”) She planned to someday build a house there and move in with her boyfriend, a Brazilian house painter whom she hoped to marry.
Barbosa also had enough money to solve what she thought was her biggest problem: She couldn’t go home to see her family, because she needed a green card to leave and reenter the US. So a couple of months into Covid, she flew to LA and flipped through a binder full of pictures of potential husbands in an office on Wilshire Boulevard. A sham marriage would cost some $28,000—$18,000 to the agency and $10,000 to the husband, paid out in $350 monthly chunks to keep him cooperative throughout the process. She felt zero guilt: At least she wasn’t feigning romance with a citizen. Cleaner for it to be a business transaction.
Barbosa bought a white sundress at a boutique and a crown of white flowers and drove to a park, where a Covid-masked officiant married her and a man named Mario by a flowering jacaranda tree. An agency staffer snapped pics for evidence, and Mario’s real girlfriend looked on. Barbosa’s family, who knew the drill, FaceTimed in on her phone. Her Instagram post from the day doesn’t mention what was really happening; it shows her alone in her sundress on the beach. Caption: “The sky is the limit!”
