NEW YORK — Thousands of tourists and residents who took New York City’s iconic yellow taxis were quietly ripped off by drivers who frequently manipulated their meters to double the fare rate, officials said Wednesday as 59 drivers were arrested. Six drivers reeled in more than $10,000 apiece by repeatedly bumping their meters up to a higher suburban rate when...
NEW YORK — Thousands of tourists and residents who took New York City’s iconic yellow taxis were quietly ripped off by drivers who frequently manipulated their meters to double the fare rate, officials said Wednesday as 59 drivers were arrested.
Six drivers reeled in more than $10,000 apiece by repeatedly bumping their meters up to a higher suburban rate when they actually were in the city, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said. One driver did that more than 5,100 times between November 2008 and June 2010, prosecutors said.
Unsuspecting passengers overpaid an average of about $5, officials have said. But they said the overcharges added up to a sprawling scam among the cabs that are part of fast-paced life in New York and are seen fondly as symbols of the nation’s largest city.
The criminal cases represent the most serious offenders among thousands of drivers believed to have deployed the fare trick before the city took steps to stop it this spring, officials said. “With the imperceptible tap of a button, taxi riders went from trusting customers to the unwitting targets of a widespread con operation,” District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance said at a news conference.
Still, officials stressed that the allegations involve a fraction of the city’s roughly 48,000 yellow-cab drivers — and that their roughly 13,000 taxis are now equipped with warning systems that alert passengers if the higher rate is being charged.
Some passengers said they hoped the prosecutions would further deter such fraud, while others wondered whether they might, unknowingly, have been victims of the suburban-fare scam. “It might’ve happened, and I might not have known about it,” lawyer Robert Davis, visiting from Washington, D.C., mused Wednesday as he waited for a taxi outside Pennsylvania Station. “Suspicion only gets you so far.”
Cabbies, meanwhile, worried that the arrests would taint them. “Usually, we’re known to be honest people. When something like this happens, then everyone’s in trouble,” said Mamadi Keita, 46, a taxi driver since 1997.
The investigation began after a passenger complained to the city that a fare had rocketed up to $20.20 during a trip from midtown Manhattan to Queens last July. Officials concluded the driver had tripped the meter to the higher suburban fare — double the rate charged within city limits — and the passenger overpaid about $8.
After poring over taxi trip and meter data, the city Taxi & Limousine Commission concluded in May that almost 22,000 cabbies had improperly charged the higher rate, which is supposed to apply only when taxis cross into suburban Westchester or Nassau counties. Passengers were overcharged 286,000 times, for a total of about $1.1 million, the TLC said.
Drivers said some seeming overcharges were actually honest mistakes. Taxi Commissioner David Yassky said in May that cabbies who overcharged once or twice would not be punished.
Wednesday marked the most serious potential punishment so far: felony charges of scheming to defraud against 45 drivers, and misdemeanor petty larceny charges against another 14. The drivers, who were being arraigned Wednesday, stole a total of more than $235,000 during about 77,000 taxi trips, Vance said.
One, Mfamara Camara, overcharged a total of about $15,500 through nearly 4,800 fares, prosecutors said. Another, Santiago Rossi, is accused of upping the fare 5,127 times to bilk about $11,000.
Each driver facing criminal charges is accused of wrongly switching to the suburban fare at least 300 times. “The defense of ’mistake’ is simply not plausible” in their cases, Yassky said Wednesday.
The city has also pursued administrative penalties — fines or license revocations — against about 2,000 cabbies, Yassky said. So far, 161 have had their licenses yanked and another 124 have been assessed fines from $1,000 to $10,000, he said.
While the individual losses may be small, the rip-off allegations struck a nerve with riders, city Department of Investigation Commissioner Rose Gill Hearn noted. “A trip in a yellow taxicab is a quintessential New York experience for visitors to the city and a needed means of transportation for many New Yorkers,” she said.
And, she added: “Most people view the rates as high enough.”