Travel South America #12: I just got scammed by a taxi driver!

From Mendoza (Argentina), I took a bus to Santiago de Chile as this amazing bus ride takes you directly through the Andes mountains (stay tuned as I upload a post on this fantastic ride!). When we arrived at the main bus terminal, I went to pick up our bags and my two friends I was with told me that they had found a taxi to take us to our hostel. We tried to negotiate a price however the driver mentioned it was on a meter and so we agreed and got into the taxi.

Alarm bells first started ringing when a second man got into the taxi with us, not just the driver. This seemed very unusual but we had just taken a 12 hour bus journey and were a little delirious and so assumed maybe he was the translator?

Even a scam can't take away the beauty of this city! (Taken on my Sony Xperia Z3 Compact)

As we started making our journey to our hostel, we noticed the taxi meter was going up very very fast. Too fast. We had just arrived in the country and didn't have much Chilean peso's (CLP) and so we needed to stop at an ATM. The second man decided to step out the car with me and go to the ATM and even started pressing buttons for me. I may have been a bit tired but I wasn't that tired! I told him to step back while I got my money out and then we carried on.

We eventually arrived outside our hostel and had to pay this astronomical taxi fare of CLP $19,000 (which is approx. £23 or $30). I handed the taxi driver two CLP $10,000 notes and in the split second I bent down to pick up my bank card I dropped, he told me I had only give him one CLP $10,000 note and one CLP $1,000. I panicked as he handed me that bank and desperately looked for the other CLP $10,000 I might have dropped but we were parked in the middle of a busy road and with cars honking past us, the driver and his friend shouting at us in Spanish, my friend handed them another CLP $10,000 note and then they were gone.

That's when it hit me.

What happened was as I dropped my card, the driver placed the CLP $10,000 note in between his legs and picked up a CLP $1,000 note. The pressure him and his friend put on us meant we panicked and in our tired state of mind we paid an additional CLP $10,000. A total of CLP $30,000, aka £36 or $50. To put this into perspective, the next taxi we took back to the bus terminal only cost CLP $2,000.