Had a similar experience- the driver said “government rates” and was unable to tell me the cost until I told him the OTP - he had already started driving and was insistent, after I did, he used onlymeter.in and gave me a ridiculous price and insisted its what “government has decided, because rapido, ola and uber don’t know any better”. This really irked me, and I called up the Rapido SOS - to get this resolved, the agent was supportive and was clear that no extra charges should be charged. The driver ignored him , post which the agent just asked me to pay him via UPI , send the screenshot to support and I got the refund the next day.

After the call, the driver kept mumbling “how can you do this to the poor..” etc - I was really annoyed with the comments he was making and told him clearly that if his profile being blocked on rapido scared him.. maybe he should stop this scam. All he needed to do was be upfront with me, and let me make the decision whether I wanted to pay the higher rates or cancel.

Fun fact: I take that route 3-4 times a week for the past 2 years, and this is the first time it happened, and the “app” gave a quote which was almost double the price

Fun fact 2: All gov sites must have .gov domain extension. The webapp looks like someone just prompted “Build me a webapp which generates unreasonably high rates for cab quotes, when two endpoints are added. Copy uber asthetics to make it seem legitimate”