US$10,000 once left behind in cab
ComfortDelGro alone recorded 27,700 items last year, and 86% were claimed by their owners
By Maria Almenoar 
HONEST CABBY GIAM CHEOK TAT, who drives for Prime Taxis, was prompt in returning an envelope of documents 'lost' by a Sunday Times reporter. He also refused to be paid for making the trip. Out of six envelopes 'lost', only three were returned. -- ST PHOTO: WANG HUI FEN
CABBY Wang Swee Fook was cleaning his taxi at 4am recently when he noticed a black bag in the boot of the vehicle.
Used to forgetful passengers leaving items in his taxi, he thought nothing of it until he searched the bag for some form of identification.
The rectangular document bag not only contained a laptop and documents but also stacks of brand-new US$100 bills amounting to about US$10,000 (S$14,000).
Keeping the money did not even cross his mind, he said.
'It's not mine, why should I keep it? I should return it to the passenger,' said Mr Wang, 54, a relief driver who has been driving taxis for about 30 years and is now with CityCab.
'Our company told us before to be honest taxi drivers. If a passenger leaves his belongings behind, we must notify the company.'
But not all cabbies heed this advice.
On Feb 14, ex-SMRT taxi driver Neo Boon Seng, 42, was jailed for three weeks for helping himself to items left behind by a couple including cash, a laptop, a haversack and a bottle of wine.
The passengers had unloaded their bags from the boot but had forgotten about the items in the front passenger seat.
Every day, careless passengers leave items in taxis - ranging from mobile phones and bottles of wine to umbrellas and prams.
ComfortDelGro, the largest taxi operator here with 15,000 of the 24,000 cabs on the roads, said that 27,700 items were left behind in its taxis last year.
That comes up to about 2,300 items a month. Of these, 86 per cent were claimed by their owners.
The company keeps found items in a storage room at its building in Sin Ming. There are currently about 1,500 items.
Owners have to produce some form of identification and describe their lost item in detail before they can claim them.
Cab companies give passengers three months to collect their items before they are given to charities like The Salvation Army and the Singapore Red Cross Society.
Trans-Cab's general manager Jasmine Tan said that if there is a dispute - for example when a passenger insists he lost something in a particular cab but it cannot be found - the company checks the meter.
'If there is only a one-minute difference between the first and second passengers, the second passenger might have taken it,' she said.
'The drivers know they can get their licences revoked so they won't take the risk.'
Additional reporting by Carolyn Quek and Tan Dawn Wei http://www.straitstimes.com/Free/Sto...ry_209776.html 
US$10,000 once left behind in cab 
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