cpx

In PEK, seen taxi scams of some level a few times.. but nothing outrageous.

- we were 6 people, so we always took 2 cabs. A couple of times
the difference was huge for the same rate taxi.

- going to the airport from the hotel, the taxi guy refused to
turn the meter on and said 200 rnb.. we stopped him and walked off.
it was about 60 with the other taxi

- a ride across the town was about 23RNB, I gave em 100rnb bill
the taxi guy started giving the hange back in singles.... and he stops around
40+ I didnt move until he handed over 77 bills.


In New York.. and airport transfer (bad weather - airlines paid)
one taxi guy took 3 passengers from 3 different airlines and received
$75+85+80 for the same ride. I dont know if it was a scam.. but it
makes me wanna be a taxi driver

Peter4

Reminds me of a common, but gentle, scam in some of the tourist restaurants in Bangkok.
After you pay the cheque, they will return the correct change, as a large pile of 1 Baht coins.
Most Western tourists don't want a heavy pocket full of coin, so they leave all of them for a tip.

- Peter
.

stut

A few of the bigger ones I have been exposed to:

Being approached by a smartly dressed man in the Little India area of Kuala Lumpur. He flashed a card at me, introduced himself as the tourist police, and kept asking if I was Russian, stating that there had been some problems with Russians and drugs in the area. He asked to search my pockets, for me to give him ID, etc. It didn't seem right, so I politely asked to see the ID again. It was a rather cheaply laminated card labelled 'Tourist Police', entirely in English. Again, it didn't seem right. I started speaking louder, manoeuvring myself so I was more visible to passers-by, and politely offered to accompany him on foot to a marked police station. He eventually gave up and left.

In Manila (ah, too many to mention, but this one could have been particularly bad) spotting out the corner of my eye a small bag of powder being dropped into the rear footwell. We ended up taking the riskier but visible approach of demonstrably going "oh, look some rubbish", and throwing it out the window, out of sight, then getting the driver to pull over on a busy street.

We were also targeted by police on the make in Manila, who, under the guise of helpfulness, rather threateningly forced a travel agency to reopen for us to book plane tickets. We were then asked for a 'tip' at the end of it, but the demands for that grew from the generous to the extortionate. We eventually left, but were threatened on returning to the area.

Driving near the Draa Valley in Morocco, we stopped to help a motorcyclist who appeared to have run out of fuel (quite a big thing in that area, as there was nowhere around). He gave us a note in Arabic and an address to go to to send some people out. It already looked slightly fishy, but seeing as it was unclear, we weren't going to leave someone stranded in the middle of nowhere, so went along. They duly dispatched someone, and sat us down to thank us with mint tea, etc. Lo and behold, several carpets appear and the hard sell starts... Even now, it's unclear whether this was a ploy or simply an opportunistic sales pitch.

On my first visit to India, years ago, the sheer volume and inventiveness of some of the scams impressed me. For exaple, in Delhi, the 'Ex-Servicement Airport Transport System' bus (the standard cheap way to get into town), dropped you at New Delhi station, but on the opposite side of the tracks for Pahar Ganj, the backpackers' ghetto. So, guess what, rickshaw-wallahs standing on the station overbridges, posing as Indian Railways officials, trying to persuade you that you need a ticket to walk over the public bridge, so have to get a rickshaw round, oh look, there's a friend of mind there he can help you, etc, etc.

Closer to home, in London, 'mobile phone ransoming' is quite a common one - someone asks to borrow your phone for an urgent call, then demands a sum of money to give it back to you. I actually had this tried on me for a cigarette lighter years ago, but I managed to retaliate by doing the same to the scammer's bike, so that worked out OK.

I saw a rather lazy taxi scam on arrival in Cuzco, where everybody seemed to be expected to pay 20 Sol instead of the standard 5. Our taxi driver was no exception, but we were both tired and ended up shouting "no!" rather exasperatedly. He immediately lowered it to 5.

Finally, not so much a scam, but along more 'dodgy taxi driver' lines, a colleague of mine asked for a receipt from a surly taxi driver, and left zero tip (he'd been unfriendly and frankly taken a pretty poor route). He folded the receipt, put it in his wallet, and didn't look at it again until claiming expenses. At which point, he opened it up to find nothing but the word "......" written on it...

ronen

from my experience- in India you get cheated all the time
we ordered a taxi for 3 from the hotel (in the main bazaar) to the international airport, the next day they crammed 6 people into the cab- so they got double the amount of money- we tried to protest, but they said they will just leave us there...
in Kashmir i bought a packge of closed Philladelphia cheese - it turned out to be half eaten...
but that what traveling in India is about and one shouldn't get to excited about it.

goodo

I was scammed once in NYC. I was probabyly around 19 or 20 at the time. I was on a bus in manhattan and a guy comes over to mem and asked me if i spoke hebrew. Well we started conversing, and he gave me a whole sob story about how he flew into the country because his mother was in hospital, and it was a sunday so the banks were closed so he couldn't pay for the drugs. He basically convinced me to lend him some money and he'd send me the money back when he gets back to Israel. And i didn't have enough so I actually went to an ATM to give it to him. I can't remember exactly how much but it probably was around a couple of hundred bucks. Of course i never saw the money again.

goodo

jpatokal

Took a taxi from a major Shanghai hotel to Pudong, in a bit of a rush to catch the flight. Meter was turned on, but when I get to the airport the fare was about 100 RMB higher than it should've been. Naturally the cabbie plays dumb and I had no time to argue, so I just asked for a receipt so I can report the guy later. And I got it too... only problem is, it was a legit receipt for 12 RMB, for an entirely different trip. One slippery scammer!

In squeaky-clean Singapore, where I've taken cabs hundreds of times, I've precisely once had a cabbie try to pull a "airport surcharge" when going from a hotel to the airport. When informed that such a beast doesn't exist, it turned into a "limo surcharge" (it was a Merc); when informed that the limo surcharge is the $0.20 already included in the flagfall, he stood his ground but offered to waive it. I asked him to keep it, made sure it was printed on the receipt (along with his license plate number), and sent it into to the taxi company -- who duly replied with an apology and a stack of free taxi coupons.

etch5895

Message Deleted as OT

BNA_flyer

I've seen the "no have change" taxi scam here in the US, in Minneapolis--fell for it once, when trying to break a $10 bill for a short cab ride. Since I generally travel between the same two points (hotel and work) when I take a cab, I now bring the same sum in small bills every time. If you get me there faster, you get a larger tip, but my cost will always be the same.

The "car out of gas, give me X sum to get home" scam is so common in Nashville that I've seen the same people at the same gas stations repeatedly, having apparently failed for months to get home to Murfreesboro (a Nashville suburb--and it's nearly always Murfreesboro, for some reason). They don't seem to recognize that they've tried to hit me up before, though I certainly recognize them.

ojala

We experienced a "taxi" scam at JFK.

We arrived, for my first time in NYC for real, to JFK and tired from the travel we walked towards the taxi stop. There was a man that asked if we needed a taxi and asked us to follow. Instead of the taxi stop, he walked towards the parking area. It was a typical taxi van and looked reasonably ok. The guy didn't look sleasy and I had a major size advantage over him. Before we took the ride, I asked that we'd pay the fixed rate, which he agreed.

He did drive pretty directly to our hotel in Manhattan and chatted a bit. For the fixed airport rate he said it would be per person and emphasized tip not included.

I won't be doing that mistake again, and I've skipped all the "need a taxi?" comments before at all airports, but I was quite suprised that such a scams would happen in major city and airport like JFK, and so clearly. I guess all the ground security is checking people's shoes and the arrival is free turf for scamsters. On our next NYC trip we had a airport transfer booked in advanced.

Condition One

I wouldn't jump to conlcusions, Ojala. Being able to speak Spanish, I ask taxi drivers if I can pay them in dollars first. If not, I usually have small peso notes to cover the fare without needing to ask for change. And as I said in my previous post, only one taxi driver (out of at least two dozen rides) preferred pesos. I find that carrying dollar bills is much more convenient than carrying around large amounts of small peso notes and coins.

If you've ever been to Buenos Aires, some stores in the touristy areas have prices in both pesos and dollars. Of course, I doubt you'll see this in Warsaw...

PTravel

Taxi touts are a near-universal phenomena -- I can't think of an airport in Europe, North America, South America or Asia where I haven't seen this scam in action. I automatically ignore anyone offering a taxi, and head for either the marked taxi stand outside the airport (where, in most cities, there is some form of uniformed attendant) or, in places like Sao Paulo, the clearly marked pre-pay booths.

I'll repeat from an earlier post: in all of my travels, I have never once been offered something by a stranger that I wanted or was even in my interest.

PTravel

Last night, at the smaller branch of a very well known restaurant in BA, there was a sign in the window indicating the restaurant would take dollars at an extremely favorable exchange rate. I had left all of our American money at the hotel, so paid in pesos (still incredibly reasonable). I've noticed that in some countries in South America, e.g. Uruguay, prices for expensive items, such as electronics and cameras, will be in US dollars (indicated by "U$S"). This was true in decidedly non-touristy places like the main shopping mall in Montevideo.

Flaflyer

In Prague, I had a large k note and street level vendors did not want to change it. Went in large Macy's type department store, bought a few items. The girl was Real Slow counting back my change, acting like it was the first time she ever counted this high. Something told me to count. Carefully. After a long time and a big stack of bills in my palm, she turns back to the cash drawer and hesitates, hoping I would take it as a sign she was done and leave. If this was a regular store back home I would have left. I might have been spotted as a tourist, but I also did not speak a word of Czech and it's darn hard to complain if you don't know the language , so this all happened in total silence. Having counted, I froze with my hand full of bills right in front of her nose. After a few seconds which seemed much longer, she realized I was not leaving and that I knew I was short. Finally without looking at me she reached in the drawer and slowly took out the last 100 k note, placed in on my pile, and closed the cash drawer. Count your change. OTOH, Praha is a wonderful town, I highly recommend it.

secretbunnyboy

Not to be unsympathetic - and I agree that the Budapest system is a bit fiddly - but that's not exactly a scam in the classic sense. You did not, technically, have a valid ticket, and they were, technically, entitled to fine you on the spot. I bet that it would be legally possible to have a ticket written for later rather than hit an ATM, and I am sure (the system being a bit unwieldy unless you know it) that looking out for tourists probably yields a higher hit rate than for locals, but it still wasn't exactly a scam, entirely, don't you think?

BTW, there is a very funny film about Budapest ticket-checkers called Kontroll: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373981/ http://www.kontrollfilm.hu/

alanh

I've been fairly lucky. I encountered a pair of clumsy pickpockets on Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, Russia. The first was the diversion, who jumped in front of me and acted like he couldn't push the door into the Metro open. The second came up behind me. The idea was that I'd crowd up to the first guy to help him push the door open. While distracted, the second would get my wallet. But the first guy was such an obvious actor, my first instinct was to grab my wallet and back away.

Also in Russia, I saw a number of people having their "documents checked" by the police. For some reason, they didn't pay any attention to me.

The other case was the very common trick of someone offering to sell me a Tube ticket at a discount in London. Had I bitten, the ticket would have been used or expired already.

I usually have a prearranged ride in Vegas, but the Vegas forum here has a long thread on "tunneling" -- taxis taking you the long way around through the tunnel under the airport.