BTV Taxi News

12 Jan., 2012 UPDATE

Apparently Williston Taxi was rather suddenly renamed Williston Transportation and after numerous reports we have seen Danny “Fraud” driving both Williston Transportation and Vermont Tour & Charter vehicles.

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Danny Ardesh -a seemingly amiable sort- is?(was) the owner of Friendly Fare Taxi.  In more recent times Mr. Ardesh  has been representing Vermont Tour & Charter, presumably because its owner, Mr. Bill Cross, his working partner of many months,  has been barred from the Burlington International Airport (BTV), by way of a no trespass order, for repeated solicitation in the airport terminal.

Present dots connected, four years ago at this time*, we were able to bring to a halt Mr. Ardesh’s most  ambitious web publishing program.  Unfortunately there were, and apparently still are not any laws in place, to reward Mr. Ardesh his just due.

* this only came to our attention in late June of 2007 while performing some basic company name web searches.  We have no idea how long Mr Ardesh had been attempting to defraud legitimate existing businesses, though the copies of the material we retain read: © 2006.

Mr. Ardesh perpetrated a fraud in that he published a minimum of 16 web sites wherein he led the viewers to believe that legitimate businesses -in no way affiliated with Mr. Ardesh- were in fact associated, if not owned, by his Friendly Fare Taxi operation.  Which might explain why that company name is no longer displayed on his vehicle, and in fact, someone sharing his surname, at his residential address, has recently registered ‘Williston Taxi‘ with the Secretary of States office.  In some instances, when one googled the name of one of those legitimate businesses, the search result would list the fake Friendly Fare Taxi site as the #1 search, the  legitimate company site being further down the top 10 list.  Nonetheless, his fake sites generally appeared in the Top 10.

When contacted about this fraud in 2007, Mr Ardesh laughed in our face, stating the sites were hosted offshore, and nothing could be done to stop him.  Which is essentially what we discovered when contacting the Vermont Attorney General’s office, among others, in July 2007.  Unless we wanted to waste a boat load of money, in hopes of getting the courts to address this problem, we didn’t have a leg to stand on, per Mr. Ardesh’s immediate, and subsequent, ear to ear taunts.

Furthermore, there wasn’t much chance of raising funds from the affected businesses because those contacted didn’t understand the technical nature of the problem.  They had paid for advertising, they had advertising, where’s the problem.

However Mr. Ardesh was wrong, in part.  Once the hosting service was contacted and made aware of his fraudulent shenanigans, they removed in excess of four dozen of his sites from the web, which at the time, seemed the closest thing to justice available.

However, another remedy escaped us at the time which earlier this year we have attempted to utilize.  Which was to bring this situation to the attention of the licensing agencies, specifically to the BTV airport administration charged with taxi and contract carrier licensing.  Unfortunately, no response has been forthcoming, not even to see the evidence.  Our hope, given the evidence available, that Mr. Ardesh would be denied the privilege of being re-licensed.

How was this fraud perpetrated?  Mr. Ardesh used the basic template from his actual web site: a vehicle photo across the top with his business name and phone number overlaid, with several dead links in the left column navigation bar.  But! near the bottom in the body of the page, one would see the name of the business for which they had searched, underscored, by what appeared to be some sort of graphic design which when the font size was increased several times(which most viewers -unaware something was amiss- probably would not bother with), actual text would be discovered(purporting, in butchered English, that the named company was actually associated with Mr. Ardesh’ Friendly Fare Taxi company).  The trick was that the text was rendered so small, it was unreadable, except by search engines which analyzed the underlying HTML programming code.  (These days, search engines will no longer be fooled by this sort of trickery, as font size is now analyzed since their algorithms have been adjusted to disallow text sizes unreadable by the human eye).

My apologies for not publishing these facts before now, it simply never occurred until recent months, when Mr Ardesh -while representing himself as Vermont Tour and Charter- again taunted us, by denying his fraudulent behavior ever occurred.

We’d love to see you in a court of law Danny ‘Fraud’, perhaps you’d be kind enough to arrange it.

Have you had a questionable transportation experience -whatever the mode- in our region*.  If so, HERE is your chance to alert your fellow traveler(s) so they might avoid shiftless or unethical Operators.  Please be specific.

* Burlington International Airport is a modest but regional transportation hub primarily serving north & central Vermont, the eastern Adirondack Park, the border area with Quebec including Montreal, etc.

Did we mention, we support economic boycott as a means of improving standards of service.  Which is the point of asking for specifics such as the driver & company name, the vehicle fleet number and/or license plate number, time & date, and supporting details of your experience; so others can be forewarned and spend their money elsewhere in support of responsive companies and/or Operators.  This is our effort, to help the buyer beware(Caveat Emptor), and the public’s participation is critical.

Questions?  Ask Dear Cabbie.