JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The video attached to this story is from a previous, related report.
When you get in the back of a rideshare like Uber, you never really know what kind of driver you’re going to get.
And that is the case for Chris Chaney and his wife.
They got into an Uber at Jacksonville International Airport. They came to town with a group of friends from Cincinnati on Friday. They were spending a nice, long weekend in Jacksonville before going to Monday Night Football.
"Nothing out of the ordinary," Chris said. "Ordered the Uber and the driver shows up in a Tesla."
He didn't know it during that Friday ride to his rental house in Ponte Vedra, but it turns out the guy driving the Uber was Amit Patel -- a former Jacksonville Jaguar employee who is charged with stealing more than $22 million from the team.
"He was really chatty, he was giving us recommendations about bars and restaurants," Chris said.
"When we drove by Ponte Vedra Inn and Club he told us he was a member there."
Chris said the driver told him he'd recently been laid off as a 'senior financial manager' but said nothing about the Jaguars, or where he worked specifically.
It wasn't until after getting home to Cincinnati when the news articles starting coming out about someone being charged with defrauding the Jaguars that he started putting the pieces to the puzzle together.
"I saw the headlines and didn't click on them at first," he said. "I figured I'd check the story later. But then my wife texted me and said, 'This was our Uber driver.'"
He pulled up the receipts from his ride, "That's him," he said. "This is our uber driver."
He even tweeted about it:
"I can't get over this, my mind is racing about this," he said. "This guy decidedly did not seem like he had a federal probe on him. Honestly he was one of the nicest Uber drivers I've ever had."
And considering Chris had no idea who the driver was at the time, and his story about recently being laid off, he gave Amit five stars and more.
"I actually tipped him extra, he sounded like he was down on his luck, so I gave him 25%."