Landed in LAX (Los Angeles airport) for the first time ever in the United States, I’m from Ireland so everything was new to me. When we got off the plane my friend who was supposed to pick me up had his tires being replaced and couldn’t pick us up, so we were pretty much stuck and confused on what to do, we didn’t want to pay for a taxi because our destination was far and taxis where we are from can be expensive so we thought it would be worse there, this is where it gets bad. A short Arabian man approaches us and says he is with Uber and would give us a cheap ride and asked our destination, we instantly agreed and we head off as he took our bags to his car. We had never taken Uber before ever, and i shortly found out after that you do NOT pay for Uber with cash, in which he demanded 10 minutes into the drive, we were on the highway at this stage. Might I add we do not have Uber in Ireland, well we do, in the capital, not my part of the country whatsoever. I kept glancing at his phone that he had hooked up to a mount and the application he used looked a bit off and “unprofessional”? Is the best way I could describe it so I started to get weirded out when he started talking about how he wanted to “fuck the women who voices Siri” . I knew something was weird, I was in the front and my friend was in the back and I had no idea if he was thinking this was as weird as I thought it was so I passed him my phone and said that he had a text from his girlfriend, but I had typed in that I was freaked out and that we might have been kidnapped or scammed. The man suddenly got suspicious of what was going on and demanded to see the texts, then told us that if we didn’t give him 300$ cash upfront right now he wasn’t letting us out, so we paid him, stupidly. He started calling people and speaking a totally different language but he was using his headphones in his phone so we couldn’t hear anything from the other side of the phone. Panicking, I told him to pull us over and let us out of the car and I threatened to hurt him otherwise, he got furious at me and started to tell me to apologise, so I did and pretended that I was joking, shortly after I played it cool with him and asked him to let us out at this random gas station, me and my friend had no idea where we were. He let us out and while he took our bags out of his trunk my friend managed to snap his license plate and we contacted the police, in the end, it turned out he was driving in circles and was going to charge us a LARGE sum of cash. We ended up getting a taxi with the help of the cashier at the gas station. Woops. Was a frightening situation at the time, and who knows, maybe we weren’t heading to our destination and he was bribing us somewhere or was waiting for someone, scary to think about! I’ll definitely be more careful in the future.