Bangkok part II- The scam

Bangkok is famous for a lot of scams and one of the oldest scam is the "government owned shop" scam. It involves that your tuk-tuk driver takes you to a "government owned shop" in the hope that you will buy anything or even if you don't, supposedly the tuk-tuk driver still gets petrol vouchers. Whether the petrol voucher is true I have yet to ever find out. Anyway, Dan and I were walking and trying to navigate around Bangkok with our incredibly crappy map. It was almost impossible to figure out where on the map we were and what direction we wanted to go to. This lovely day we had the Royal Palace, Wat Pho and Wat Arun on the agenda. Mostly because those were the only sights I could remember from when I was last sightseeing in Bangkok in1996. We got to a crossing and hauled out the map to get some sense of how lost we were. A man crossing the street at the same time approaches us and is seemingly just wanting to help. He kindly points out a few more sights that we could see, how much it will cost with tuk-tuk and tells us that the royal palace etc is only open in the afternoon. The last part we don't really believe since that is a textbook thing that people say when they want to sell you something or something else is going on, but the guy wanders off and does not try and sell us anything or take us to a tuk-tuk. After a bit of contemplation we decide to go for a tuk-tuk and check out the additional sights.We have two days to kill here in Bangkok so why not. We cross the street and start looking for a tuk-tuk and there's a bunch standing further down the street. We get into the first one that approaches us agreeing on a price. It is a ridiculous price of 20 Bath (about US 75 cents) to visit 4 sights and we know we will most likely end up in a "government shop". There's no way this guy would agree to that price otherwise. The first sight is a nice 45m standing buddha and there's some celebration going on. Next stop is supposedly the Lucky buddha. This time our driver shows us the "entrance" to the buddha which is actually the backside?? Hmm a bit strange. To add to things he's talking on his mobile phone and as we come around the corner there are two guys standing at the backside of the buddha and one of them is also talking on his phone. Coincidence?? The driver and the guy hangs up approximately at the same time which made us both a bit suspicious. We walk in and the driver walks back to the tuk-tuk. The other guy who had also talked on the phone comes in after us and starts talking. I'm on alert as the guy talks and talks and talks. I can't figure out what he's trying to accomplish. Distract us, but there's no one else around? What is the purpose of this whole thing?  After 10 minutes of constant chatter from his part we make our way out of there. Go back to the driver and ask him to take us to sight #3 the marble temple. Yes he say but first we are stopping at the "government shop". I knew it! We discuss a bit but in the end we're like OK but we are not buying anything. Tuk-tuk driver says that's alright as long as we enter and have a look and besides both Dan and I need to go to the loo so these shops should have some nice toilets:). And that's pretty much what we did. The quickest browse ever mostly looking for the toilet sign and then out. There we've done our duty. Our driver takes us to the next stop but we noticed that he seemed a bit annoyed or angry. We don't think much more of it, but when we came back out from the marble temple the driver had dumped us and left.  We knew that it had been some kind of a scam or attempt to a scam but we weren't sure how it worked since in the end we hadn't paid him his 20 bath yet and we got a free ride around Bangkok.
The next day around the same crossing we actually saw the same man that had approached us first and he was talking to a tourist. We watched from a distance and saw "our" tuk-tuk driver walk by while the man was talking to the tourist. This confirmed that they were working together but still after a lot of speculation we can't work out the point of the whole thing and think it was the worst scam ever....and is it really a scam when you know you are being scammed?!