Credit-card taxi 'scam'

Cabbies busted for 40G in ‘fake’ rides

Investigators cracked a ring of crooked cabbies who bilked clueless passengers and city vendors out of about $40,000 in a credit-card scam that charged them for bogus trips, authorities said Thursday.

Twelve hacks were busted and a 13th man was also arrested for posing as his brother, a licensed cabby, said Mark Peters, head of the city’s Department of Investigation, which handled the probe along with Queens DA Richard Brown’s office.

“These taxi drivers turned their cabs into a crime scene. They exploited their taxis’ electronic-payment systems to run up thousands of dollars in fake charges for fake rides,” Peters said in a statement.

The vendors responsible for electronic payments in taxis at the time of the alleged rip-offs, Creative Mobile Technologies and Verifone, tipped off investigators about suspicious charges that were allegedly made between January and July 2015.

Most of the “trips” lasted less than a minute but had charges ranging from $100 to $499 per trip.

Almost all of the victimized credit-card holders told investigators they were not even in the Big Apple at the time they were charged.

The 12 suspects were hit with multiple charges, including grand larceny and criminal possession of stolen property — felonies punishable by up to seven years behind bars. They are all in custody and were awaiting arraignment in Queens Criminal Court.

Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, said the alleged dirty dozen — whose Taxi and Limousine Commission licenses have been suspended and will be revoked upon conviction — do not reflect the city hacks as a whole.

“This is not representative of the workforce. This is 12 people out of 50,000 active drivers,” she said.