https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...investigation/

Federal investigators are probing an internal program, dubbed "Hell," that Uber used to keep tabs on its leading competitor, Lyft, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.

"Uber created fake Lyft customer accounts, tricking Lyft?s system into believing prospective customers were seeking rides in various locations around a city. That allowed Uber to see which Lyft drivers were nearby and what prices they were offering for various routes," the Journal reports. "The program was also used to glean data on drivers who worked for both companies, and whom Uber could target with cash incentives to get them to leave Lyft."
Federal investigators are reportedly probing "whether 'Hell' constituted unauthorized access of a computer"?which is a federal crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the anti-hacking statute Congress passed in 1986.
If the federal government does ultimately charge Uber with criminal computer hacking, it would be a sign of just how broad the controversial law's reach has become. The CFAA was originally passed to prevent people from hacking into other peoples' computers. Uber, in contrast seems to have automated a kind of competitive intelligence-gathering that would have been completely unremarkable if they'd done it manually. Every big company gathers data on competitors' prices and tries to recruit competitors' employees.