new scam at Suvarnabhumi airport in Thailand
July 27, 2008
refer to http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/thread.jspa?threadID=1640812&tstart=0
A friend of mine forward me this story, in Thai. I’m translating it so you can forward to your foreigner friend/acquaintance to be caution.
On July 23, 2008, a client of his company supposed to be arriving at Suvarnabhumi Airport from Australia. The company already assigned a person (one of their manager) to pick the client up. Coordination were made and the client knew that he will be dropped off at Novotel Bangna for overnight stay before travel to the factory upcountry next morning.
After the plane had landed for a long while, the pick-up person still not meet with the client. So he called the hotel to find out that the client had safely arrived at the hotel and already checked in. Very early next morning, the manager met with the client to verify how he come to the hotel. The client told him that there was a person claiming to be representative of the company took him from the airport and drop him off at the hotel. This impersonator also charged 3,200 THB from the client for his service, and left a card and a receipted saying the service was provided by “Airport Taxi Service”.
The manager also found out that the client asked this impersonator to meet again at 09:00 for the trip to the site upcountry that morning. So he took the client to the site himself and ask his staff to come and meet this impersonator at the hotel at 09:00.
To keep the long story short, this impersonator was an illegal taxi driver. (This can be distinguished by the car’s license plate. The legal taxi would either be yellow plate with black character or white plate with green character. The illegal taxi would be white plate with black character.) Once confronted by the staff of the company and a police, he claimed that he was contracted by an accomplice inside the airport, who claimed to be representative of this company.
The accomplice inside the airport arrival hall would go around the greeting area, make notice of the meeting sign held up by the person who supposed to pick up a person that they never met. Such as the sign mention a name of the arriving party, they then make a copy of the sign and step in closer to the arrival exit at the airport, so the impersonator sign would be noticed by the arriving party before the genuine person. Add this to the confusion at the arrival hall at the airport, the arriving party would easily be misled.
It is true story ,please be careful.
For me, I met the same story in Romania for biz trip. The taxi driver has the Airport taxi driver card. And he can speak english well. so I though he is real taxi driver. Then he drove toe me and stop at the near hotel , not in front of hotel that make me curious but I didn’t think much. I paid the taxi fee, 180 Lei. The day after I asked the hotel taxi to sent me the office , suddenly I saw the hotel taxi the price from Airport to hotel. It is about 55 Lei. I regonize immedently I got cheating from the Romania taxi driver already. 
