The Guangzhou SEC Enforcement Bureau recently seized a number of taxis accused of scamming customers by “taping their meters.”
The practice basically entails fixing a piece of tape over part of the meter to obscure the starting fare price, which in theory could be any multiple of ‘10.’ Although the decimal point is in the wrong place after the tape is applied – a meter would read 1.00 instead of 10.00 – some passengers don’t notice.
A story run yesterday by Tencent News profiled a recent case of ‘meter taping’ in which a cabbie used tape to cover the fact the meter started at RMB20 – instead of the normal base fare of RMB10 – when the passenger was picked up.
In another case, a taxi fare was reported to be RMB151 before the car even left the airport, suggesting the driver failed to clear the meter before picking up a second passenger.
Two tips we can pass along to our readers are: make sure the lever that starts the meter is in the upright position upon entering a taxi and check to make sure nothing is obscuring the digits on the meter screen.
These both may seem obvious, but after a late night on Xingsheng Lu or 15-hour flight back to China, you’d be forgiven for forgetting to look.
[Images via Tencent News]
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