Paris taxi scam cost £493 but Monzo won’t help me

I went to Paris to recover from the grief of losing my dog. All was going well until I took a taxi from a rank outside Musée d’Orsay to my hotel near Notre Dame – a 12-minute journey. The meter showed €9.70 (£8) and the driver asked me to get out of the cab and pay on the card reader through the car window as the internet connection was poor. While I was doing that he surreptitiously altered the amount on the screen, and when I returned to my hotel I realised he had charged me €570 . I immediately filed a fraud report with my bank, Monzo. It rejected my claim because I have no evidence of the agreed price. This a common scam as far as I can tell, and it relies on the fact that you don’t pre-agree a price with a cab driver, or get an invoice or receipt. This will keep happening to people unless banks start clawing the money from the scammers. RG, London This is a similar scam to the case of the £600 slice of cheese in Brazil , which I reported last month. Whether it’s cheese or taxis and wherever you are in the world, con artists take advantage of tourists’ unfamiliarity with local currency and furtively adjust the price on the card reader in between the customer approving the sum and presenting their card. Because it is a face-to-face card transaction, it does not qualify for the protections offered to victims who are tricked into paying fraudsters by bank transfer, a scam known as authorised push payment fraud. …