The hottest spot north of Havana... my £705 taxi on the Copacabana
Mrs S.E. writes: My husband and I were the victims of credit card fraud while on holiday in Brazil. Our cruise ended in Rio de Janeiro, where we were to spend five days before flying home. We took a taxi from the port to our hotel in Copacabana, some ten miles away. The fare was 156 reals, about £35. The driver took my credit card and inserted it into a card reader connected to his dashboard. He kept his hand over the machine as the wire would not reach me in the back seat. I checked the price and entered my PIN. No receipt was given. At the hotel, I telephoned the card company and found the driver had put through a charge of 3,156 reals, or £705. YOU arrived in Rio de Janeiro on board the luxury cruise liner Queen Victoria, and the time taken to drive from its berth to your hotel would have been perhaps half an hour at most. This is not long enough to run up a fare of more than £700, even if it had been the swankiest taxi in the world, with champagne on tap and live entertainment all the way!
Staff at your hotel tried to help. They even checked the hotel CCTV in case it had picked up the licence plate of the taxi. Unfortunately, all your efforts locally came to nothing, and when you flew back home a few days later you contacted your Visa card issuer, Nationwide Building Society.
You might have thought that Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act would help. This is the bit of law that makes card issuers equally responsible alongside merchants if a deal involving over £100 goes wrong.
The Catch-22 is that you must be able to prove that the deal really did go wrong, and as you had no invoice or receipt, you could not show what the £705 had really bought. In theory, you could have been paying the taxi driver in advance for several days of exclusive use of his cab, or for a guided tour of Rio, or even a long journey into the interior of the country.
I asked Nationwide to make its own enquiries but these drew a blank. Although you have told me that when you called Visa from your hotel the payment had not yet gone through, Nationwide found that in fact it had been made even before you stepped out of the cab.
It told me: ‘Nationwide sympathises with our customers who appear to have been overcharged for their taxi journey while on holiday in South America. Unfortunately, the couple are not able to provide any documentation to prove the fare they agreed with the taxi driver, such as a receipt, which means that a Visa chargeback or a Section 75 claim will not be successful. As the payment was authorised by the couple using Chip and PIN, it cannot be considered as fraud.’
I might have to disagree with that. As far as I can see, you have been robbed at the point of a PIN, just as surely as if you were robbed at the point of a gun.