You Might Have Just Ordered Food From A Restaurant That Doesn't Actually Exist. Here's How...

#1 Ghost Restaurants

Do you REALLY know where your food comes from? New York is home to 'ghost restaurants' listed on Seamless and GrubHub...that do NOT appear in the city's inspection grades database. But it doesn't stop at the Big Apple, recent news investigations by NBC have found similar non-existant restaurants throughout the country.

#2 Freshly Delivered To Your Door

You've had a very long day, and you're hungry. You pick up your phone to call your favorite pizza shop but remember you have an app that has loads of different restaurants that will deliver to your door. Better than ordering pizza again. You place an order on Seamless or GrubHub, and 20 minutes later, a sweaty cyclist hands you the steaming sack of soggy noodles. That's a pretty good arrangement, right?

Well, what if that restaurant you just got a delivery from doesn't even exist?

#3 Fake GrubHub Listings

NBC in New York did and intensive investigation and looked into over 100 restaurants hosted on the popular delivery apps, and found that more than 10 percent of them weren't actually what they claimed to be.

These 'ghost kitchens' listed false addresses and fake names to dupe their clients. Sometimes, they were actually other restaurants operating under multiple names in order to increase their odds of getting your business. In a few of the cases, they discovered the food was actually coming from kitchens in dirty apartments though they were listed as downtown eateries.

#4 Home Cooking

One restaurant listed on both Seamless and GrubHub went under the name Sandy's Cuisine NY, but when the NBC team tracked the location down, the food was actually being cooked in an east side apartment that was disgustingly filthy. Five different investigators tried to locate the physical address of the establishment but failed until finally one delivery person spilled the beans. To make things worse, they had no license and were operating illegally, and the business was not registered in the city.

#5 Really!! Chinese

One of the breakthroughs in the investigation is when they ordered food from a listed Chineses eatery called 'Really Chinese'. It turns out that they ONLY take orders through online platforms and they are not what they appear to be. The app listing says they serve Asian and Chinese food, have a 3-star rating and are located on 31st street.

#6 The Real Location

The listed address on the app web page says they are located at the 31st Street location but that address is a private upscale apartment building, one they just picked at random. After being tracked down for months, the NBC team finally discovered that Really Chinese was a front for another restaurant, 'Abby Chinese', which was closed due to numerous health and code violations and was actually located a few blocks from the fake lisiting.

#7 It's An Open Secret

Because the restaurant was closed down, they were using a front to sell their meals to unsuspecting diners which is why they only did online delivery of their food. After the owner was tracked down and the actual place where the food was being cooked, NBC reported that Gary Chen told them that "When we have one phone line, it's hard to compete. We know how many lines some of the other restaurants have. It's an open secret." He also admitted that he was selling his food from a ghost restaurant. When film crews entered the kitchen, where the food was being prepared and packaged for delivery, they nearly vomited.

#8 Averting Health Code Inspections

"Some people might be operating from their apartment, from their home, and delivering to people in complete contravention to Department of Health regulation," Julie Menin, New York's Consumer Affairs Commissioner, told NBC. She said that they are doing what they can to stop the violators but because there is no accountability on the part of the apps to verify the restaurants licenses or code ratings, there isn't much they can do at this time.

#9 GrubHub Takes Action

When the story aired, GrubHub and Seamless took immediate steps to address the issue, and the sites removed Abby Chinese and it's alter ego from their rolls. From now on, a spokesperson said, they'll double check addresses against Department of Health databases before allowing the app to carry the listing. She also noted that Grubhub was not accountable for anything because they are not liable to the Department of Health, anywhere in the country but is going ahead and acting to keep good faith with their consumers.

GrubHub and Seamless recently merged.

NBC affiliate teams from 7 major cities including LA, Atlanta, Miami, Seattle, and Chicago also ran subsequent investigations and found similar ghost restaurants. In Atlanta, the NBC team discovered 19% of the listings on GrubHub were fake and were not operating under health codes. That means your chances of getting food delivered from a dirty kitchen were probably pretty high if you used the app often.