Police bust alleged Ontario taxi scam artists as they attempt to snatch man’s debit card
Jason Sullivan was walking home on a mild September evening when he says a taxi pulled up beside him and a passenger bundled out of its doors and asked him if he could help pay his fare.
The man said the taxi driver wouldn’t take the cash he had and asked if Sullivan could pay with his debit card in exchange for cash. Sullivan recalled the man handed him a banknote, visibly upset.
“So I tried to tap on my phone and that didn’t work, so he said, ‘You have to insert your debit card,'” he told Global News. “I never carry my debit card on me, so I tried again with my phone.”
At that point, Sullivan said the taxi driver told his passenger, a 19-year-old, he’d have to drive him to his parents’ house if he couldn’t pay.
“When I couldn’t pay, then they had already had this scenario played out in their head, where if someone can’t pay, they will keep the dialogue going,” he said. “It was fully planned, right to the end.”
The driver and passenger are accused by York Regional Police of running a taxi scam in Vaughan, which may have several victims. They were arrested by police on Sept. 26, the same day.
Sullivan said he left the scene to retrieve his debit card, concerned about the passenger’s apparent plight. He returned a few minutes later to find the area crawling with police.
“It was really weird, there were like 12 police cars running down my street and K9 units and everything else,” he said. “I didn’t suspect anything. I tried to be a nice guy.”
York Regional Police said they had been tipped off about the alleged scam earlier the same day.
They said on Sept. 26 at around 8:45 p.m., the two men approached someone else in a commercial plaza near Colossus Drive and Famous Avenue.
They allegedly went through the same routine, but the man was suspicious, wrote down the vehicle’s licence plate and called the police.
Police said they located the vehicle and followed it to an area of Toronto, where they watched Sullivan speak to the two suspects. When he left to get his debit card, officers assumed he worked out the ploy and swooped.
The two men face several charges, including possession of stolen property not exceeding $5,000 and disguise with intent.
Investigators said the scam allegedly involved taking the victim’s debit card to complete the payment, and, instead of returning it to them, they gave them another victim’s card. The scam artists then allegedly withdraw funds from the card they have snatched.
York Regional Police are not the only force to issue alerts about the style of scam, which Toronto police have also warned is increasingly common.
Sullivan said the alleged scam had harmed his faith in people and that he felt burned trying to do the right thing.
“It makes me not want to help anybody in the future,” he said.
“They do prey on the kindness of people and, for me, being able to see their faces physically and see the kind of distress that they’re in — or ‘distress’ that they’re in — makes me want to help. So it actually really hurts knowing that there are people out there that will take advantage of other people’s kindness.”
York Regional Police have said there could be more victims, and asked anyone impacted to reach out to investigators.
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