The counterfeit money scam catching travellers in Beijing

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This was published 4 years ago

The counterfeit money scam catching travellers in Beijing

By Therese and Larry Thomson
Updated
Be cautious when exchanging cash with taxi drivers in Beijing.

Be cautious when exchanging cash with taxi drivers in Beijing.Credit: iStock

We took a taxi to this park in Beijing. On arrival we paid the driver the agreed amount and what happened next was bizarre. He kept throwing the money back to us, so we kept giving different bills, thinking he wanted smaller amounts.

This kept going on and on, all the time shouting at us in Mandarin. We finally decided to get the hell out of the cab, almost getting hit by the mad traffic in the process.

We then took a tour around the park on a carriage with the driver peddling us. When we paid him, we were walking away when he came chasing after us waving the bill.

He produced a machine which he fed the bill into and would you believe it, it came up with "counterfeit". By this time we had quite an audience around us. We managed to scrape up more money to pay him.

It left us in a terrible position as we had no idea what money we had was good or not, and we had great difficulty getting back.

We discovered all of our 100 bills were counterfeit, and as we had never been given any of these in change, and we got all of them from the bank, we can only assume that the taxi driver had been swapping our money with counterfeit. How he managed this we don't know, but what other explanation could there be?

Unfortunately it was Sunday, and we were flying out that night, so we were unable to get to the bank to report it.

When we got home we sent all the money to the Chinese embassy with a covering letter, but we are still waiting...

Stuff.co.nz

See also: I think I was a drug mule

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