Meeting up with the Cambodian mafia

As I arrived at Hualamphong, Bangkok's main train station, Sunday afternoon they informed me that ticket booking had closed and I had to come back the next morning to buy my ticket to the small city of Aranya Praphet at the Cambodian border. At 5am that very next - Monday - morning, I had had a whole night of packing and organising, some 2 hours of sleep, and a 30 min taxi ride through a dark and seemingly deserted version of the otherwise vibrant city. Even the train station seemed dead, apart from the ticket booths here they charged me 48 bath (less than NOK 10) for a 3rd class bert (the only class available). I dozed off most of the trip, and some 6 hours later I was trying to navigate the tuk-tuk offers to get to the border and into Cambodia. Getting a correct tuk-tuk price wasn't all that difficult--but you have to be scammed once in every country, right? And Thailand had gone pretty well so far, so... In short, the tuk-tuk took me and two Italian guys to a place whe we could organise our visas. At double price, obviously. I knew this was a scam, but couldn't stop it in time. Then the visa-guy tried to sell me a seat in a shared taxi from the border to Siem Reap--clearly at a bargain price, for him anyway. When I declined, he pointed out ""that all the money goes to me anyway, I control all the taxis, no point in not buying my taxi.." I guess that should have tipped me off! The charming fella, let's call him "Tony", walked a group of 10 people, including me, across the border before he tried to sell us all taxi seats or bus seats at double price. In fact , he tried to sell us every single scam the Lonely Planet has listed for Cambodia--pretty impressive! We all declined and walked off to get shared taxis to Siem Reap at a fair price. Tony and his driver followed us in their car, offering us a better price now but still scamming us completely from what I'd found in travel blogs online. It got to a point where I forced a smile and tried to make it into a joke as I told him he was crazy, and he was offended and told the other travellers I was both crazy and rude when I walked off. Whenever we asked a taxi driver for a car to Siem Reap, he would eye Tony and his driver stalking us, point to their car and tell us to get a taxi with them. A whole street of taxis, a whole street of drivers pointing to Tony. In the end, we really had no choice but to get a ride with one of his guys--and I was fuming with anger! Until I discovered that in many ways he was right, I must have come off as rather rude: When negotiating the prices I quoted prices per person, while he quoted a price per car... And so, as our young and friendly driver explained that the police and Tony's company owned the main road in Phoipet and noone else got business there, the lot of us got to Siem Reap paying way less than most people do anyway.