Vancouver Taxi Service - Heads Up!

[hikergirl]

After leaving our ship at Canada Place, we grabbed a taxi to drive us to the airport. When he dropped us off, he pointed to the meter and it said 36, which of course is Canadian dollars. We said we would pay by credit card. He said, do you have cash? We said, only American. He said, ok, I'll take that.  But he never said what it would be in American dollars.  I think he was expecting that we were dumb Americans, and would turn over $36 plus tip, in US cash to him. $36 Canadian is around $26 in American. Nice little profit for him. Cab riders, who are in a rush to get to their plane, would easily fall for this scam.  We said, no, we will pay with a credit card.

[psuboater]

8 minutes ago, hikergirl said:

After leaving our ship at Canada Place, we grabbed a taxi to drive us to the airport. When he dropped us off, he pointed to the meter and it said 36, which of course is Canadian dollars. We said we would pay by credit card. He said, do you have cash? We said, only American. He said, ok, I'll take that.  But he never said what it would be in American dollars.  I think he was expecting that we were dumb Americans, and would turn over $36 plus tip, in US cash to him. $36 Canadian is around $26 in American. Nice little profit for him. Cab riders, who are in a rush to get to their plane, would easily fall for this scam.  We said, no, we will pay with a credit card.

Also, when using your card anywhere it'll ask if you'd like to pay in CAN or USD. Always choose the local currency, your bank will have the better exchange rate. 

[martincath]

'At Par' payment accepted is fine when our currencies are closer to equal, but yes, with the consistently ~75cents to the dollar rates of recent years not worth it at all financially. Usually cabbies don't try to straight-up scam visitors with At Par, but they do pad the rate in their own favour (and since they need to wait until they visit the US or go to an exchange place it's not unfair to pad the rate a bit to reflect the hassle, e.g. 'call it US$30')

 

But you did absolutely the right thing sticking to using a credit card OP - even if you'd had $36 exact in USD rather than handing over $40, he'd have been tipped very generously! Paying just the same number in USD is roughly a 25% tip on top of a reasonable amount of currency-padding - not super-scammy, but a nice little bump in pay even if they did say something about not needing to tip extra on top of the number in USD...

[GTJ]

11 hours ago, hikergirl said:

We said we would pay by credit card. He said, do you have cash? We said, only American. He said, ok, I'll take that.

While you have focused on an exchange rate scam, it could have simply been a tax scam. That is, by paying with cash, the taxi driver might not report the full amount as income, and evade the tax on that income. Indeed, it was tax evasion, not exchange rate scamming, that first came to my mind.

[MBP&O2/O]

Creative accounting is the polite term1😁

[dawnvip]

I think it may be fairly common practice to accept US dollar cash payment and then keep the US$ and remit their earnings in CAD.

Most canadian companies use terrible exchange rates (worse than banks!), so employees benefit from discounted US$ exchange rate to keep the cash.