Shivani Sharma delivered food across Berlin for three months. Every order she fulfilled registered on the Wolt app. Every kilometre she rode was tracked. And then, when she went to collect her €3,500 in wages, the man who hired her had left the city - taking her money with him.
When she sued, the Berlin labor court told her she had no case against Wolt. Because technically, she never worked for Wolt. She worked for a company called IMOX - a firm with a registered address in a village in Brandenburg, a managing director who appears to live in an allotment garden outside Poznan, and no discernible business activity of any kind. IMOX was, according to Sharma's lawyer, a shell - nothing more than an entry in a commercial register, placed there to absorb legal liability so that the actual platform operator never has to answer for a thing.
This is not an isolated scam. It is, as a DW Documentary published today reveals in granular and disturbing detail, a system. One with multiple layers, multiple beneficiaries, and a very specific pool of victims: young Indians who came to Germany looking for an education and ended up trapped between debt, substandard universities, and bosses who pay them in cash from the back of a car.
The background
To understand how this works, you need to understand what food delivery platforms actually are - and what they are not.
Companies like Wolt (owned by DoorDash), Uber Eats, and Lieferando are, in legal terms, technology companies. They provide an app. A restaurant lists its menu. A customer orders. The app dispatches a courier. The platform collects a fee from the restaurant, typically between 15% and 30% of the order value. The courier gets... whatever the person who hired the courier decides to pay them.
That last part is the gap where everything goes wrong.
In Germany, most food platforms do not employ couriers directly. Instead, they contract with fleet partners - small companies that recruit, hire, and pay the actual riders. The platform sets the rules of the app and collects the revenue. The fleet partner handles the humans. This structure is legal in principle. In practice, it creates a wall between the platform and any individual worker's employment rights - a wall the platforms have shown considerable interest in maintaining.
Germany's minimum wage - the legal floor below which no worker can be paid - currently sits at €12.41 per hour. German law also requires that food couriers be paid by the hour, not per delivery. These protections exist. Enforcing them, however, requires knowing who your employer actually is. And in the subcontractor model, that question rarely has a clean answer.
Into this system arrived tens of thousands of Indian students. Since a migration deal between India and Germany was signed in March 2023, the number of Indian students in Germany jumped by roughly 50%, reaching around 60,000. Indians now make up the largest group of international students in the country. Many of them paid placement agencies to find them a spot at a German university - agencies that earn a commission for every student they place and have, predictably, placed a great many students at private institutions that charge high fees and offer credentials of questionable value.
The blocked account is the mechanism Germany uses to ensure students can support themselves. To get a visa, students must show they have enough money - roughly €11,904 per year - locked in an account from which they can withdraw just under €1,000 per month. It sounds like a safety net. But tuition fees at private universities can run between €9,000 and €16,000. Housing in Berlin can cost €600 for a single bedroom. A student on a blocked account with high tuition fees is, financially, in a hole from day one.
Student visas in Germany allow a maximum of 20 hours of paid work per week. That ceiling, combined with a requirement for German language skills in most legitimate jobs, leaves food delivery as one of the only realistic options for many new arrivals. Couriers do not need to speak German.
What is actually happening
The DW Documentary follows several couriers over months of embedded reporting, and what it finds is a layered extraction system that begins before the student even lands in Germany.
One courier, called Pararmmad Kumar in the DW Documentary, borrowed the equivalent of €20,000 from his family to come to Germany. Half went into his blocked account, as required. The other half went to tuition at IU - Germany's largest private university, with approximately 130,000 students across 37 campuses and tuition fees of €9,000 to €16,000. Kumar enrolled at IU's Berlin campus expecting a proper institution. What he found was a set of rooms at the back of a shopping centre.
When Kumar fell seriously ill and could not pay his fees, the university removed him from its student registry. That put his residence permit at risk. To get a new permit, he urgently needed employment. In other words: the private university system pushed a sick, broke student directly into the arms of the informal courier economy.
Another courier in the DW Documentary - identified only as "Lovpreet" - had his boss pay his health insurance premiums to create the appearance of a legitimate employment relationship, then recouped those premiums directly from his wages. On top of that, his boss deducted a further 30% of his pay. The DW Documentary calculated his real hourly earnings over a month of work: approximately €7.10, roughly half the legal minimum wage. When Uber Eats was presented with this information, the company said it had terminated its partnership with Lovpreet's fleet partner - a response that neatly illustrates the model's logic. The platform terminates the contract. The fleet partner dissolves or rebrands. The workers are left with nothing.
According to TRT World, workers have to pay a commission of up to €600 to get registered on the app through fleet partners, plus 20% of their weekly earnings. That admission fee - a charge for the privilege of working - is itself illegal under German law. The DW Documentary captures it happening in real time: at a co-working space near Potsdamer Platz, a man setting up a fleet for Uber Eats checked couriers' passports and health insurance cards. He already had more than 80 names on his list. Each of them had paid €500 for an employment contract.
The shell company structure runs deeper than just rogue intermediaries. When Wolt cited IMOX as Sharma's legal employer in court, the DW Documentary's reporters tracked down IMOX's supposed managing director - a man who signed his name "Yaroslav" on official documents - to an allotment garden in Poland. He said he had never heard of Wolt. He said he did not know anything about managing 50 workers. According to Heise, court documents stated that IMOX and Wolt had formed a joint operation with a management structure that jointly planned and directed specific activities - which makes the managing director's professed ignorance either remarkable or unsurprising, depending on your level of cynicism about the industry.
The money trail
Follow the money and the structure becomes obvious. Wolt, Uber Eats, and Lieferando collect fees from restaurants. They also collect data - enormous quantities of routing data, delivery time data, customer behaviour data - that has independent commercial value. The platforms bear none of the employment costs: no minimum wage obligations, no social security contributions, no sick leave, no health insurance. Those obligations land on fleet partners, who are often small operations with limited capital and every incentive to minimise what they pay.
According to Labournet TV, fleet partners withhold 30% of wages, do not provide employment contracts, and use false documentation. The workers, meanwhile, are locked in by debt and immigration status. A courier who complains risks losing their job. A courier who loses their job may lose their right to remain in Germany. The threat of deportation is not incidental to this system - it is one of its operating mechanisms.
The private university pipeline feeds directly into this labour pool. Agencies in India earn commissions for placing students at institutions like IU or the Berlin School of Business and Innovation (BSBI). BSBI, the DW Documentary reveals, is not technically a university at all - it operates through franchise agreements with overseas institutions, offering degrees from foreign universities. Germany's Central Office for Foreign Education told the DW Documentary's reporters that English-language degrees from Italy's Uni Netuno, awarded after courses at BSBI, are not recognised in Germany under Italian higher education law. The BSBI disputes this. The students are left to discover the distinction after spending tens of thousands of euros they borrowed from their families.
According to Expatrio, Germany retains roughly 46% of its international graduates even ten years after they begin studying, one of the highest rates globally. That statistic is used to market Germany as a destination. The couriers in this story are unlikely to be part of it. They arrived to study data management and business innovation. They ended up delivering pizza, working illegal hours on fraudulent contracts, and - in at least one documented case - being beaten badly enough to require hospitalisation after attempting to strike for better pay.
The strike itself was organised via a WhatsApp group of 700 couriers. One of the subcontractor bosses responded with an audio message: "If he doesn't know what mafia is, we will show him what mafia is." A courier leader was beaten. The police launched an investigation. According to Heise, Germany's Federal Labor Minister Bärbel Bas subsequently began considering a direct ban on the use of subcontractors by platforms like Uber Eats, Wolt, and Lieferando - describing direct employment as "the only chance to bring more transparency and offer security to the employees themselves."
The incentives driving all of this are not complicated. Platforms profit from cheap labour. Fleet partners profit from wage theft and admission fees. Placement agencies profit from tuition commissions. Private universities profit from fees that often cannot be repaid. At each step, money moves up, and the person pedalling the bicycle gets less.
What people are doing about it
The couriers themselves have been the most visible force for change, despite operating at enormous personal risk.
The WhatsApp strike organised in Berlin, primarily by Indian Uber Eats workers, was, by the account of one participant in the DW Documentary, unprecedented - "I don't think Uber had any strike before it." Workers organised to decline delivery requests in coordinated waves, then emailed Uber Eats directly demanding better pay. The response from subcontractor bosses included threats of violence and, in at least one case, actual violence. Several strike leaders were fired immediately - one reported that his access to the app was cut off the day after he participated.
In September 2025, a self-organised group called the Lieferando Workers Collective held a demonstration in Berlin. The collective's argument was explicitly structural: this is not just a problem for riders, it is a problem that will spread to other parts of the economy if left unchallenged.
Lieferando - which had been, until recently, the outlier in Germany's food delivery market, employing couriers directly and allowing them to form a works council - announced in July 2025 that it was laying off 2,000 couriers, about 15% of its delivery workforce, by the end of the year. The company said it was shifting toward fleet partners to make deliveries "more agile and efficient." According to The Local, Lieferando had previously been the only platform to pay couriers by the hour at the legal minimum wage and to allow its riders to form a workers' council. The shift away from that model is being watched closely by labour advocates who see it as a signal about the direction of the entire industry.
At the legal level, Sharma's case continues. She lost in the Berlin labor court - the ruling turned on the question of whether she could prove direct employment with Wolt, which she could not - and is now appealing to a higher court. Her lawyer describes the situation as organised crime, and says the app operators are "creating the conditions for criminality right here in Germany."
Germany's labor ministry has classified food delivery as a high-risk sector for illegal employment, making the industry subject to stricter oversight. The EU Platform Work Directive took effect in December 2024, and EU member states have until December 2, 2026, to implement it into national law. The directive would create a legal presumption that platform workers are employees, not contractors - shifting the burden of proof onto the platform to demonstrate otherwise. German lawmakers have flagged that the directive's current text does not address subcontractors specifically, which means the shell-company structure at the heart of this story may remain legally intact even after implementation.
Germany's ambassador to India, speaking in the DW Documentary, acknowledged that some Indian students are ending up in "illegal employment and precarious living conditions" through dubious educational institutions that aggressively market themselves in India. He called it a negative trend. The word he used was "headache."
The bottom line
Germany's food delivery platforms have, over the past several years, constructed a system that is profitable precisely because it is opaque. The platform provides the technology, collects the revenue, and contracts out the workers to intermediaries who are structurally incentivised to commit wage theft. Indian students - funnelled into Germany by placement agencies and into debt by private universities of questionable legitimacy - end up as the most vulnerable participants in that system, because their immigration status depends on their ability to keep working, and their ability to keep working depends on not complaining too loudly. The EU directive due by December 2026 is a step, but it leaves the subcontractor question unanswered. Until that gap is closed, the model continues to pay.
Timeline
- March 2023 - India and Germany sign a migration deal; the number of Indian students in Germany subsequently rises by approximately 50% to around 60,000.
- Early 2023 - Wolt terminates its partnership with subcontractor IMOX after violations of company guidelines are identified.
- January 2025 - Indian Uber Eats couriers in Berlin organise a strike via a 700-member WhatsApp group; at least one strike leader is beaten and hospitalised; police open an investigation.
- Early 2025 - Lieferando begins expanding its use of fleet partners, moving away from its direct-employment model.
- June 2025 - Around 60 Lieferando couriers in Berlin's Neukolln district are summoned by their bosses and paid approximately €50,000 in cash envelopes - reportedly an off-the-books wage payment linked to fleet operator Fleetlery GmbH.
- July 2025 - Lieferando announces it will lay off 2,000 couriers - about 15% of its delivery workforce - by the end of the year, citing a need for greater operational agility through subcontractors. (Labournet TV)
- August 2025 - A Lieferando strike meeting is held in Potsdam; the Lieferando Workers Collective publishes a statement opposing the outsourcing shift.
- September 2025 - The Lieferando Workers Collective holds a public demonstration in Berlin against outsourcing in the food delivery sector.
- October 2025 - TRT World publishes an investigation into how Uber Eats's subcontractor model operates in Germany, documenting commission fees of up to €600 and 20% weekly wage deductions. (TRT World)
- December 1, 2024 - The EU Platform Work Directive enters into force; EU member states have until December 2, 2026, to transpose it into national law. (Ogletree)
- December 2, 2025 - German broadcaster rbb publishes the documentary "Delivered! The Courier Business," exposing criminal networks in Berlin's food delivery industry and prompting Federal Labor Minister Bärbel Bas to consider a ban on delivery subcontracting. (Heise)
- May 1, 2026 - DW Documentary publishes "The courier driver business," expanding the story to an international audience.
Summary
Who: Indian students working as food couriers in Germany, employed through subcontractors for platforms including Wolt, Uber Eats, and Lieferando.
What: A system in which delivery platforms use layers of shell companies and fleet partners to avoid direct employment obligations, leaving couriers - many of them in Germany on student visas with significant debt - working below minimum wage, receiving wages in cash or not at all, and unable to seek legal recourse because their contractual employer either does not exist or cannot be found.
When: The system has been documented from at least 2023, with strikes and legal action concentrated in 2025. A wider public reckoning has been unfolding since the rbb documentary broadcast in December 2025, intensified by today's DW Documentary release.
Where: Primarily Berlin, with the subcontractor model documented across Germany's major cities. The platforms involved are headquartered in Helsinki (Wolt), San Francisco (Uber Eats), and Amsterdam (Lieferando's parent, Just Eat Takeaway).
Why: The subcontractor model allows platforms to profit from gig labour while insulating themselves from employment law obligations. Private universities and placement agencies profit from recruiting Indian students regardless of whether those students can find legitimate work. The resulting financial pressure funnels students into the informal courier economy, where immigration status and debt make them reluctant to complain.