Say you have a taxi cab, you don't have a cab license. How easy would it be to drive around the city, and pickup fares?

Honestly, you could make a easy $300 in a day minus the cost in gas. You could print up some fake shit to make it look legit.

You have to buy a car.
You have to paint it.
You have to make it into a taxi.
You have to pay the ridiculous fee for gas.
Cops catch you, it's probably a really hard fine or jail time.
I'd say you would have a better chance faking being a city bus, then people pay you a fare when they get on, and you get a lot more people.

Even if you had the car painted and everything, I think youd have a hard time finding people to pick up. In my city, people dont just step out on the street and catch a cab, usually you call a cab company, and they send some one out to you.
So unless you live in New York City or something...

In my city the cabs aren't painted, they're just normal vehicles with the taxi light on top. The problem is though, people normally call the company, like someone mentioned. However, if a "taxi" driver here pulled over for drunk people waving to them they would make alot of money since cabs here don't pick up people waving to them. Then you have to have the meter and stuff in the car.

In theory your idea is possible but realistically it wouldn't work, Like previously stated, to make any type of profit, you would have to live in a fairly big city, and even then it would still be tough,

Ya this isn't the movies or anything where people are waving down taxis 24/7. Who the hell knows, but all in one days work you would probably only get a few people. It wouldn't be worth it. You're better off getting one of those bike taxis. You'll lose cellulite, and make money at the same time.

You could probably pull it off in Tijuana. You would need a junker with Jesus statues on the dashboard and Christmas lights strewn about it. The car should also be pulled by a donkey.

Seriously, it could be done in the US, but it would take some balls. You would probably need a decent-looking, well-running car or van, and it would help to have a professionally-made magnetic sign to put on the doors with your "company info" on it.

Even medium-sized cities have hotels, nightclubs and bars, and the patrons are always calling for taxis. You walk into the lobby or whatever, looking all respectable-like, and say "Somebody call for a cab?" There's a chance, especially around closing time, that someone is waiting for a cab, and they might just as well go with you, especially if they're three sheets to the wind.

If you're lucky, your fare will be too drunk to fight back when you eventually steal all their money and/or take sexual advantage of them for personal or blackmail purposes (bring a camera).

I think it would be fairly simple to get your hands on a retired police Crown Vic (which is exactly where the taxi companies get their cars from), have Maaco do a shitty job of painting it yellow, and get some signs made up at your local printing shop. Any boob with twenty dollars and access to a Radio Shack could rig up some kind of light on the roof of the car, and your buddies at the sign shop could probably print you up some plackards to put in it. (You know, the part that says "Diamond City Taxi" or what have you.)

If you get bored of driving people around, try picking people up and just robbing their stupid asses. Just engage the child locks on the rear doors to keep them from getting out. Bonus points for having a friend in the trunk (via the fold-down seats) to handle sticking up, beating up, and keeping the mark subdued. The beauty is, you can take all his stuff (including his phone) and just leave his sorry ass miles from nowhere. You could be long gone by the time he called the cops, though I'd suggest getting rid of that car post-haste.

Just become an actual cab driver. This isn't the movies where some dude standing on a curb and whistles really loud and a cab from nowhere suddenly lurches in front of him. People call them in. So you would get far more customers if you actually worked for a cab company and its really easy to get a job with them. For real its an easy as fuck job when you have GPS and you work whenever you feel like it.

People already do this in my city. They just use their normal car and go downtown and offer rides for flat rates. It's technically not illegal and on a friday/saturday people are always waiting for cabs outside of the bars.