I had quite a laugh when I ran into the same guy at gas stations around 30 miles apart with the same story a number of years back…
Luckily, I gave him nothing both times.
LOL - dozensofus.gif
In Istanbul, once, when I was there for a conference. A shoe polisher ‘unknowingly dropped his brush’, so I kindly let him know. He then proceeded to polish my shoes for free, only to become very abusive and threatening, demanding money afterwards. Luckily I’m a fairly tall guy, and he was quite small, so I told him free means free, and f*ck off.
For me, it ended there, but in the days afterwards, I saw at least a dozen brushes being dropped ‘accidentally’, and I heard several stories from other conference attendants who experienced the same thing and actually paid money to get away.
Even if it didn’t cost me anything, I still felt (and feel) stupid for falling for such an obvious scam in the first place.
I paid upfront for a plumbing job that never happened, £600;
Once I paid to stream a live World Cup game, except the website never worked, and served me ads in Arabic, and then streamed games from the previous day. £50.
The most annoying was when I gave 10 euros to a deaf girl on a German train, only to pass her by an hr later when she was on the phone. Karma kicked in because I spotted her doing the same hustle 2 days later, and busted her. She was…not amused. Turns out it was a Gypsy/Romanian gang thing and they were very good at spotting the non Germans and hustling them, as most non - Germans = tourists ==> they could get away with it. And they would have too, except I was living there at the time and this was my commute to school.
Yeah, travelling through Rome and Paris for example I’ve encounted so many really aggressive scammers, thats its been very off-putting even wandering around there. Guess I really stick out as a tourist! :)
Two examples of scams that have been tried on me loads of times. They never got a dime out of me, but the constant hounding is really irritating…
A long time ago in Paris, I was walking to the bus in the place de la Concorde when some dude accosted me selling some type of leather pants or other clothing IIRC. I smiled, shook my head, said something like “no thanks” in my high school French, and walked on. Next thing I know this guy had pulled out an honest to God bullwhip and was cracking it at me. I started trotting towards our bus, and he ran after me cracking that damn whip. Made it to the bus and the driver slammed the door in his face, but it was something of an adrenaline rush for sure.
How confident are you that you said “no thanks”?
This is me as well, but to be honest it’s kind of hard to know for sure. Is there a chance I was scammed at some point, either by accident or maliciously, and I just didn’t realize it at the time? Possible. Probably likely, in fact. But nothing jumps out.
Once I was in Mexico and there was a lady selling an absolutely gorgeous, hand carved chess set. I talked her down to $50 and I suspect she thought she got a huge bargain - I later found the same chess set at the Mall of America going for $250 though, so I suspect we BOTH won that day. I also, that same trip, got a box of “Cuban” cigars - they were just Cohiba’s that were (I found later) for sale all over in the US - Cuban tobacco, but not rolled in Cuba or sold from there - but again, what I paid for the box was actually a bit less than what it would have cost me in the states. Though, I did take her advice and removed the labels from each cigar, despite that not being necessary, LOL - I’m not sure that was a scam so much as it made me feel like a smuggler for a day. :)
Sure, that’s possible for me too, but if it happened it wasn’t enough money for me to think about it twice.
This is where I’m falling. The two closest I can think of:
- At PAX one year there were a bunch of dudes trying to aggressively hawk their demo CDs. I gave one of them five bucks so they’d stop harassing us. This was early-ish in PAX’s downtown Seattle life and I never saw anything like it again, so security/PD probably cracked down.
- I guess this would probably count. Sold some Team Fortress 2 items to a guy over Steam. Wake up the next morning and see a chargeback in my Paypal account. Disputed with screenshots of the entire transaction chain but Paypal gave no shits about digital transactions at the time. I’d sold plenty of other items without incident; the main reason I don’t completely count this is because I didn’t lose money I ever had.
My dad brought my mother and I to San Francisco when he traveled there for business back when I was a teenager. While he worked, my mother and I explored the city. We found ourselves in Chinatown, where my mother stopped at a street vendor selling jewelry. She looked at a pretty ring, with a jade stone in the middle, and tiny diamonds surrounding it. The merchant was quite the salesman, and kept assuring us the diamonds were real. He told us over and over again that he was “a very honest man.” Seriously, several times he kept repeating that.
As “evidence”, he had a small tool. Pencil-like, with a sharp tip, and a light on the end. He claimed that when you touched the tip to a gem, the light would go on if it was genuine. And lo and behold, when he touched the diamonds with the tool, the light went on! Real diamonds, to be sure!
Anyway, my mother bought the ring, even though we both knew that he was full of it. But the ring was pretty, and it was cheap. (Or at least it was as much as she was willing to pay for it, knowing the gems to all be fake.)
So it wasn’t a true scam for us - we never believed the gems were real, but I guess it was a successful scam for him - he got our money.
Oh yeah that’s a good point. When I was in India my Indian friends were all very upset that I was paying way too much for stuff and not haggling enough. But everything I bought I thought was a great deal. I might have paid $8 for something I could get for $4 but who cares.
Heh, pretty sure in this case. I suspect it was my unwillingness to part with any of my Francs that did it.
Haggling is sort of a national sport in many places. In Jerusalem, in the Old City, buying some jewelry for my wife in a stall that was operating from a niche that literally dated back two thousand years or so, I had to haggle with this Palestinian dude back and forth over a necklace, the price of which we both already pretty much knew. It was fun, though, with all the “300? My children will starve!” type of banter.
I remember haggling in China over a keychain and we were about about 9 cents (CAD) apart. It just felt like the right thing to do. I ended up giving in and probably overpaying by 9 cents but there you go.
Heh, yeah. That’s the thing, though. In Jerusalem, you actually feel the history, the weight of the years. For good and for bad.
Oh, yeah, it’s not about the money usually. In Haiti, also a long time ago, going to markets in little towns in the hills where no one had seen a white person in ages, if ever, and having the local folks insist on negotiating and haggling over what was to us literally pocket change, was heartbreaking. But it would have been a deep insult to just throw money at them and not haggle.
I had estimated less than a day before someone linked to that :)
When I was coming back from study-abroad in Germany, I forgot to take my Leatherman off of my belt when checking my bags. Naturally, it set off the metal detector, and was going to be confiscated, but the nice security agent took pity on me and said if I wrote down my address and gave him 20 Euros for postage, he’d ship it back to me. As I probably should have expected, I never saw it again.
Pretty sure my mother-in-law has us all beat though. She had racked up around $120,000 to a romance scammer as of last fall, and who knows how much more by now.
Ok, ok, I’ll give it back, I promise.
My father-in-law was basically scammed by a young guy he befriended. He lived on their property for years and got possession of one of their credit cards. He would leave and then a couple years show up again and beg for a place to stay.