That's the standard arrangement in most cities in North America, not just SF. I don't think a driver processing a credit card with Square/Stripe is shady or fraudulent either. It might be against a given city's regulations, technically. But then those would be pretty messed up regulations.

>They are likely to know it was me, and they know where I live.

Never give your actual address. Pick a house number a few down. Especially if getting picked up to go to the airport. Some rogue/criminal taxi/uber/lyft drivers will ask questions about your trip to determine if your home will be vacant and for how long to pass the info onto someone else who will come by to burglarize your house.

Depends on the arrangement they have with the taxi company. If they're supposed to share a percentage of each fare with the company, then it may not be fraud in the strict legal sense, but they're certainly violating the contract they have with the taxi company.

I use Stripe for payment processing, and I'm pretty sure vendors don't get access to customer's credit card numbers. They might be able to attempt another transaction — which would be fraudulent — but you would get an email confirmation and could easily flag any such attempts. I agree that it is wrong of them to avoid regulatory or contractual obligations to use company payment processing, but they don't get your credit card number.

They can get it with whatever hardware / app they're using to run your card through Stripe.

They can also add a skimmer to the company provided reader just as easily. Even if they are white!

Why does it really matter if they use Stripe or the machine in the car, besides that it's technically against the law? If you're worried about fraud, okay, it's possible but pretty unlikely and generally if you notice anything you can dispute it with your credit card company. 7% adds up, since it's an extra 4% on top of the usual 3% fee when using services like Stripe, which is understandably hurting a taxi driver doubly since they already pay for their car lease per day regardless of the number of fares. Also take into consideration that while there are a lot of immigrant taxi drivers, many are also citizens and it's not simply immigrants that are going to do what you consider shady. If you're worried about fraud, put some notification of activity on your phone or email when a transaction runs and if you see something weird, report it. Don't be afraid of the boogeyman that doesn't even really exist.

Meh. It may be illegal, but it's one of those technical violations where the motivation really matters.

A cab driver using a much cheaper service vs. the rent-seeking credit card processing they are mandated by law to use? That's a morally correct action. The immoral action (imo) is to continue to feed into the fraud that you yourself identified earlier in the thread.

I have very little problem with a cab driver doing this, just as I have very little problem with you reporting it for the reasons you mention.

And having a rather interesting early start to my career - I assure you "native" citizens get away with this kind of crap all the time.

Where is "here" for you? As the other commenter said, at least in the bay area, drivers rent the cars for a day or a week then keep everything on top of what they pay to rent, Using Stripe wouldnt "screw" the taxi company I dont think.

What credit card do you have that you're responsible for unauthurized charges?

You're stating that they're not guilty until caught in the act.

What percentage of the population do you think scrutinizes every credit card statement line-by-line? Many people would not notice an unauthorized charge on their card. It's merely a matter of scale: some people will notice a single unauthorized charge for $5, while others won't even notice $500. Credit card fraud is rampant, and any company that willingly allows its employees to get away with it should be shut down. My experience shows that my city's taxi companies consider credit card fraud as something that doesn't even register on their radar. Drivers that operate in this manner should be criminally charged. It's not just fraud to the taxi company - it is a criminal act of theft for the customers.

Innocent until proven guilty is a cornerstone of the US judiciary system. So yes, they aren't guilty until caught (proven) because their innocence is assumed otherwise.

Not for employment law in most cases (uk/US derived law) you can be fired collectively i.e. if 1 person in a group is skimming but you cant find which one you can fire every one

Until chip and pin this was thing in some uk restaurants waiter used a black (of the books) cardreader out of sight of the punter to skim your card.

They still can do that. The only difference is that they would then sell the numbers to be used online, instead of running as fraudulent card-present transactions.

At least in Canada, portable card readers are the norm. Specifically to counter fraud, you no longer expect to hand your plastic over to an employee who brings it behind the bar. They come to you with a wireless machine, and you insert your own card. It blows my mind how the U.S. is 10-15 years behind the rest of us; the technology behind "debit cards" in the U.S. compared to that of Canada and Europe is almost laughable. The refusal to perform a one-time upgrade to new tech, while continuing to absorb the costs of rampant fraud is completely senseless.

A hundred years? That's cute. Cabs have been a cash business for 250 years:

http://www.lvta.co.uk/history.htm

It's weird that you thought the correction was so meaningful and "that's cute" was such clever snark that it cajoled you to register a new account.