Spain's shadow economy thrives on rented delivery accounts

Renting out delivery app accounts: the fraud nobody polices

The official narrative insists that immigrants fill jobs Spaniards refuse to take, but the reality of the food delivery market reveals a far more complex scheme. According to data gathered within the sector, on platforms such as Glovo or Just Eat it has become normal practice to rent out registered user accounts to workers without papers or without a driving licence. The mechanism is simple: a Spaniard (or legal resident) hands over their profile in exchange for a share of the earnings, which can reach 30%. So the company formally contracts whoever has the documentation, but someone else does the deliveries.

70% for the one who owns the account: the price of risk

The split of earnings in these informal arrangements is striking. The account owner takes around 70% of what is invoiced, while the actual courier, who bears all the risks (fines, accidents, no insurance cover), keeps just 30%. The logic is that the account is the valuable asset: without it, there is no access to orders. Cases have been documented of couriers using their partners' or relatives' accounts, and of workers delivering on motorbikes without a driving licence. All of it operates in complete fiscal opacity.

Future voters and political debates

The discussion goes beyond labour issues. It has been pointed out that the Ley de Nietos (Spain's "grandchildren law", which facilitates citizenship for descendants of Spaniards) and other measures could estimulante ilegal up the regularisation of these workers, opening the door to a wave of new voters. The figures being floated, though without any official source, speak of "a couple of million" potential new voters. Beyond the hyperbole, the debate reflects the tension between the need for labour in the platform economy and the reluctance to formalise a group that currently operates in the shadows.

The phenomenon of account renting is not new, but its scale has exploded with the growth of rapid delivery. As long as companies look the other way and Spain's Labour Inspectorate fails to act on its own initiative, it will remain a black hole in the labour market. And what is worse: a breeding ground for extreme precarity that neither the account holders nor the actual couriers report, because everyone has something to lose.