A video shared on social media claims to show an Edmonton Uber driver held at gunpoint by two passengers who violently try to remove the driver from the car.
While a caption on the video says “Drivers are not safe in Edmonton,” the video was actually taken in Texas during a robbery in 2022.
THE CLAIM
“Edmonton Uber Turned Nightware (sic),” reads the text on a one minute 59 second TikTok video published by an account called @uber.edmonton on Sept. 10.
The video, which shows the attack from both interior and exterior dashcams, shows a driver with two passengers in the back seats. One of the passengers grabs the driver, demanding he get out of the car, while the other pulls out a handgun and points it at the driver’s head. A struggle ensues, but the passengers eventually leave the car and the driver appears to get away.
The video received 117,000 views in just over a day. It was also reshared on the X platform, formerly Twitter, where it received 4,000 likes and hundreds of comments, many of which tried to use the ethnicity of the attackers to criticize Canada’s immigration policies.
THE FACTS
The video, in fact, shows an incident that happened in Houston, Texas on Oct. 18, 2022.
An image reverse search from a frame grab of the video leads to an article from a local Texas news station, KWTX-TV News 10.
The report says the suspects tried to force the driver out of the car, but the driver was able to escape.
Police later identified two suspects, one of whom was a minor, and they were both facing charges in the attempted carjacking.
There are several clues in the video that show it was not taken in Edmonton.
About 11 seconds in, a U.S. flag is visible on the driver’s ball cap, and what appear to be palm trees can be seen in the distance at one minute 55 seconds.
At one minute 49 seconds, a sign can be seen on the side of a building for the Verizon telecom company, which does not operate in Canada or have offices in Edmonton.
The TikTok account that first posted the video appears to be fairly new, with just two other videos posted. But both of those videos, also labelled as occurring in Edmonton, were filmed elsewhere.
A reverse image search of the other videos found that one shows an attack on an Uber driver in Blacksburg, Va. in December, and the other came from an X post in 2017, which appeared to have occurred in Singapore.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2025.
Colleen Hale-Hodgson, The Canadian Press
