Days after two Edmonton men jumped into a Las Vegas man’s car, and paid him $75 to drive them to a casino – a tweet about the encounter has gone viral.
On Friday evening, Steve Kaye said he had just left work, and he was at a red light near the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino when he saw two men at the side of the road.
“There were two guys trying to flag down…they were looking for an Uber, a cab or something,” Kaye said, he rolled down his window and told the two that in Las Vegas, you can’t take an Uber or cab off the street.
“They’re like ‘Oh!’, and they just heard the word ‘Uber’,” Kaye said. “So they just opened my car door and got in my car.”
Despite Kaye telling them “a few times” that he wasn’t an Uber driver – the pair offered him cash for a ride to Caesar’s Palace.
“They were like: ‘But can you be…just drive us, not far?’” Kaye said. “I said ‘I really would like to just go home’.”
“They said ‘Well, how about $75?’ and I said ‘I will drive you wherever you want’.”
So, Kaye drove the two men, who introduced themselves as Bruce and Craig, the nearly 4 kilometre distance to the casino.
Kay took a selfie with the two men, and posted a tweet about the whole incident on Twitter.
True story: stopped at a light, two guys got in my car thinking I was an uber. Despite explaining I was not in fact an uber, they insisted. I drove them to caesars and they gave me $75. Thanks Craig and Bruce from Edmonton pic.twitter.com/j1ff7Cjl4T
— Steve Kaye (@SteveKayeLV) June 2, 2018
Within a day or so, the tweet started to go viral – especially reaching users in the Edmonton-area.
“I’m just waiting on the Prime Minister to call,” Kaye said. “Pretty much everybody else in Canada has called me.”
Now, other than their first names, not much is known about the two men. Kaye said Bruce and Craig have his business card, but he hadn’t heard from them, and attempts to find them through social media had turned up nothing.
“I know they’re from Edmonton because they made it abundantly clear, we had about…20 minutes together in the car, it takes a while to go a very short distance in Vegas,” he said. “They made it abundantly clear that they were from Edmonton. They talked about being Oilers fans, they talked about how the [Las Vegas] Golden Knights are an unprecedented team right now.”
“I think we all became best friends.”
As for Kaye’s future as an Uber driver, he said he’s “hanging up his keys.”
“The best and worst part of this is I don’t think any Uber ride for a mile gets you $75,” Kay said.
CTV News checked the cost of an equivalent ride: Bruce and Craig paid $75 for a ride that would have cost less than $9USD through Uber.
With files from Bill Fortier
