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Day 27 – Shanghai taxi scam

Day 27 – Shanghai taxi scam

By on Sep 29, 2017 in Shanghai, China (2017) | 0 comments

So after leaving the Shanghai Tower, like the airport, there was a line of taxis ready to take people back. But afterwards when we got back, we realized we had been scammed financially. Our trip there cost 45RMB ($8.45CAD) but the way back was 150RMB ($28CAD). How did this happen, well looking back a few things were obvious and we won’t make that mistake again.

  1. Walk a block away and try and get a taxi that isn’t ‘waiting’
  2. He knew the cost right away (at first, we thought it was him ‘prepping us’ to make sure we could cover it). He said the difference was that side of the river was more expensive than our side.
  3. Listen to Kaelyn – she said we should ask another taxi. I should have trusted her, she had a sense it was wrong
  4. We could have ask the next taxi if we really did want to walk to follow rule #1
  5. I did insist on a receipt, but when we got home, Kaelyn told me he had a device attached to the receipt printer that he was using to alter the ‘data’
  6. He didn’t turn on the meter right away – this is a dead stop, just get out
  7. In Shanghai specifically, we had heard about the ‘red’ taxis and to be careful about their charges (honestly I hadn’t noticed until we got going)

In the end, you can see on the receipt he listed the drive as ‘39.5km’ when in fact it was more like 20km.

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