Everyone has heard of the taxi scam where the driver uses the meter but it has been rigged. But has anyone actually experienced this scam before? Probably not because most of us that use taxis, especially the tourists, don’t really know how much it costs or in some cases how far the taxi has really traveled. And most of us that are used to the prices of taxi service in the US or European countries sometimes don’t care about the cost of Bangkok taxis since it is much more cheaper than we are accustomed to back in our own countries.

Well this happened to me just last month. I was a target of a taxi driver who thought that he was going to pull ‘ye old rigged meter’ trick on poor old unwise farang. This taxi driver knew little about me except that I was a farang. I have been traveling to Thailand for business over the past six years so I have gotten to know Bangkok, the Thais (since I am married to one), and the language. Recently I have been traveling once a month from my work in Hong Kong and China to my house in eastern Thailand. During this once a month trip I always spend one night in the same Bangkok hotel near Don Muang airport. This one night stay occurs the night prior to my flight from Suvarnabhumi so I always take a taxi ride from this particular hotel to Suvarnabhumi every month. Having done this over the past year I have the metered taxi fare memorized within + 20 baht.

So it’s early in the morning and I’m ready to head to the airport. The hotel staff summons me a taxi. Some taxis will ask for a flat fee rather than use the meter and if this request is within 100 baht of the metered price I may accept it since I am accustomed to giving a generous tip or in some cases I may be in a hurry and don’t want to wait for the next taxi to be summoned. On this particular morning the taxi driver didn’t say much except for the usual, ‘sawadee khrup’ and then flipped on the meter. I thought to myself, good, I don’t need to bicker back and forth about any flat fare pricing.

Well about ten or fifteen minutes away from the airport I took a gander at the fare listed on the meter. Damn, I couldn’t believe my eyes! The price on the meter was well over 100 baht of what it usually takes for the entire trip and we are not even at the airport yet. I thought to myself, what am I going to do when we get to the airport. I decided, since I do speak some rather good Thai, but not the most perfect, that I would ask the driver if he spoke English. So I said to him, “Khun poud Engrid dai mai?” (Do you speak English?) He’s reply was. “mai”, he didn’t speak English. So I thought I would pull my cell phone out, call my Thai wife, tell her what was happening, and tell her that I might be handing the phone to the taxi driver later if we couldn’t reasonably negotiate the fare he was trying to cheat me on.

Needless to say when we arrived at the airport the meter read almost 600 baht for a ride where normally the fare costs less than 300. When the driver pointed to the meter and asked me to pay I used my best Thai and told him that his meter was fixed and he was trying to cheat me. I informed him that I take the same route every month and it is always under 300 baht. I told him that I would pay him only 300 baht and if he didn’t take that offer I was going to call the police and we would wait for them to arrive to settle the fare. Wow, you should have seen his face! He understood everything that I had said to him. He was almost in tears, begged me not to call the police and said his meter was broken and he would have it fixed/replaced immediately. He also, without hesitation agreed to the 300 baht fare that I had offered. I memorized his taxi number, paid him and proceeded to get out and go into the airport. During the whole time of exiting the taxi and walking away I could still here the whimpering driver apologizing about the meter and promising to have it fixed.

Since my flight was an international flight and I had arrived in plenty of time I decided that I would make a quick entrance into the Tourist Police office at the airport and report what had just happened to me. For all tourists’ sakes I didn’t want anyone else that didn’t know any better getting ripped off in the near future. So with the taxi number in hand I strolled into the Tourist Police office where I had been welcomed by a few assistances that spoke very fluent English. Once I explained my situation they asked me more details about the driver and car then I realized that I should have gotten. Not just the taxi number but the license plate number, the make and model of the car, the color of the car, and the taxi company name. Without all this other information there was little they could do with a report. They explained to me that there are over 10,000 taxis within Bangkok and there are probably at least a dozen with the same taxi number.

I guess lesson learned by me for not getting more details but then I’m sure that this particular driver was looking over his shoulder for the rest of the day. Hell, he may have even gotten the meter changed or fixed.

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