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Every Tourist Scam Is One of About Five Moves

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Passengers crowded around the open doors of a train on a busy Paris Metro platform

Passengers crowded around the open doors of a train on a busy Paris Metro platform

Czech law gives you three hours to change your mind about a currency exchange.

Hand over your euros at a bureau de change in Prague, take the koruna, walk out, do the sum on your phone, and if the rate was uglier than you thought you can go back in and reverse the transaction. No reason required. No fee. It covers the first thousand euros' worth, and if you changed more than that you can still unwind the thousand-euro slice of it. The bureau has to take the cash back, settle up at the central bank's rate from the previous day, and hand you written confirmation that it cancelled. The three hours run only during that branch's own opening time, so a late-afternoon exchange carries over to the next morning. If the operator obstructs you, the window stretches to six months. Above a thousand euros the bureau also has to give you the terms in writing before you commit, and those terms are not allowed to be worse than the rate posted on its own wall.

That right is a fossil. You can read the shape of the animal from the impression it left in the statute. Enough people had been walked briskly through a transaction they did not fully understand, in a currency they could not do arithmetic in, that a legislature wrote them an escape hatch, then went back and closed the loopholes the first draft had left open.

Most advice about tourist scams is not shaped like that. It is shaped like a list. Thirty numbered items, read on the plane, twenty-eight of them gone by baggage reclaim. Then something happens in a city that was not on the list, in a costume nobody described, and the list is no use at all.

The list is the wrong object. There are not thirty scams. There are about five moves.

The gift

Someone puts something in your hand, or on your wrist, or on your shoulder. A sprig of rosemary. A small bird folded out of palm leaf. A length of coloured string that has become a bracelet before you have finished working out what is happening. On the steps below Sacré-Coeur in Paris the string version is common enough to be a fixture of travel-press warnings, though no French government page I could find names it directly.

The object is not the point. The object is a receipt for a debt you never agreed to. It has been given, therefore something is owed, and the exchange is now under way whether you entered it or not. Refusing costs you a small public scene with a stranger, in front of other tourists, and the price of that scene looks calibrated to sit just above the price of the bracelet.

The tell is that the transaction starts before any price is mentioned. Australia's Smartraveller advice states the underlying principle about as plainly as a government ever manages: treat any unusual event as a potential theft attempt. Hands down, keep walking, do not take the thing. Once it is knotted onto your wrist you are arguing about a bill, and arguing about a bill is a losing position by design.

Two hands tying a coloured string bracelet onto another person's wrist

The closed door

The second move reroutes you. The palace is closed today. There is a ceremony. The road is shut. Your hotel burned down last month, but the driver knows another one.

The Bangkok version has run so long it has its own literature. A man in clean clothes, dressed in the phrase the accounts keep reaching for as a student or a gentleman, waits near the Grand Palace or Wat Pho and tells arriving visitors the site is shut for a holiday. He is friendly and unhurried. He asks where you are from. A tuk-tuk appears, and it is cheap, or free, because the tourism ministry is said to be paying for it. The route now includes a jewellery shop where gems can be bought at what is described as duty-free price and resold at home for three times the money. The information arrives in fragments, from several people who do not appear to know each other, which is what makes it feel like discovery rather than sales.

Take out the gems and the skeleton is the one Australia's consular service describes for taxi drivers generally: seemingly friendly drivers offering cheap tours, who deliver you to shops that pay them commission. The same service notes the airport variant, where unlicensed drivers work the inside of the terminal while the licensed ones wait outside at the official rank. Anyone who comes to find you is already telling you something.

The counter is boring and complete. Verify a closure at the door of the thing that is allegedly closed. A person standing two hundred metres from an entrance is not a source of information about that entrance.

A tuk-tuk waiting at the kerb beside a temple wall in Bangkok

The helpful stranger

The third move is the hardest to defend against, because it uses your decency as raw material.

Spain's official travel advice describes a version with an unusually clean test attached. Thieves posing as police officers ask to see your wallet, saying they need it for identification. Genuine officers, including plain-clothes ones, carry official ID and will ask to see yours. They will not ask for your wallet or your purse. In traffic matters the same advice notes that real police are normally in uniform, that an unmarked patrol car identifies itself with an illuminated sign in the rear windscreen reading "Policía" or "Guardia Civil", and that genuine officers ask for vehicle documents rather than your bag. It also describes highway pirates who flag down foreign-registered and hire cars, claiming something is wrong with your vehicle or that you have damaged theirs.

Morocco's version comes with a badge test. Anyone guiding you around a medina quarter is supposed to be licensed for it: a badge on them, and clearance from whichever local authority issued it. People working the same job with neither are common enough that the Foreign Office writes it down.

Smartraveller lists an offer of help, or a request for help, from someone you do not know as a standard distraction technique, sitting alongside the friendly stranger who joins your table at an outdoor café.

The pattern underneath all of them is help you did not request, arriving at the exact moment you look unsure. The counter is not rudeness. It is a pause and a change of ground. Real authority survives a walk to a police station, a hotel desk, a ticket window. Manufactured authority does not.

Banknotes passing through the window slot of a bureau de change beneath a rate board

The pair

The fourth move needs two people and is over before you have turned back round.

Britain's advice for France states it without decoration: the thieves operate in teams, and while one of them occupies you a second is already inside your bag. Italy's says beware of thieves using distraction techniques. The geographies they name are not the same, which is itself instructive. Italy's advice points at city centres and major tourist attractions. France's points at the Paris Métro, the RER lines and the mainline stations.

The distraction itself can be anything. A petition on a clipboard. A dropped coin. A jostle at a closing door. A spilled drink. A child pressing against your hip. What matters is only that it is surprising, because surprise throws your attention outward, and everything you own is inward.

So the defence here is a reflex rather than a rule, and rehearsing it until it runs without you pays for itself: when something odd happens, your hands go to your own pockets, not to the odd thing. The rest of the official advice runs in the same direction. Passport and cards in separate places. Bag across the body rather than hanging off one shoulder. Valuables in the inside compartments. No distractions around attractions and cash machines.

The switch

The last move lands at the instant of exchange, while your attention is on the social business of a transaction rather than the physical business of it.

Smartraveller's example is exact: change for a ten when you paid with a hundred. Morocco's advice describes a swap at the counter, where what you chose is quietly replaced with something cheaper before it reaches your bag. The same move appears as a QR sticker laid over the real code on a café table or a parking meter, a card taken out of sight and run through a second machine, a taxi meter that never goes on, a bar that brings food you did not order and produces it on the bill when you stand up, a tea house or a massage where the price is disclosed only afterwards and you are not allowed to leave until it is paid.

The most expensive version takes a document rather than money. Thailand's advice is blunt about it: never leave your passport behind as security on a motorcycle or jet-ski hire, because operators have kept them hostage against damage they say you caused.

The counter is a deliberate slowness at the handover. Say the amount out loud as you pass it across. Count the change in front of the person who gave it to you. Run a thumbnail along the edge of the QR code. Watch the meter go on. None of this is elegant and all of it is free.

What the five have in common

Edward H. Smith, writing about confidence men a century ago, broke the con into six stages: foundation work, approach, build-up, the pay-off or convincer, the hurrah, the in-and-in. Street scams are compressed versions of the same thing, and they compress hardest at the front.

Smith's foundation work is preparation before the game, the assistants hired and the background studied for the role. On the street that is the tuk-tuk driver who is already in on it and a script worn smooth by thousands of repetitions. The approach is simply a stranger being pleasant to you. The build-up, in Smith's definition, is the point at which you are shown a way to profit, which is precisely what the duty-free gems are for. The bracelet has no build-up at all, which is why it is the crudest of the five and the cheapest to escape. The hurrah is the manufactured urgency: the closing window, the last day of the scheme, the ceremony that ends at four.

The in-and-in is why the Bangkok version uses several people who seem unconnected. Smith's conspirator puts his own money into the scheme to make it look legitimate. The street version uses the cheaper relative Smith also describes, the accomplice who plays an uninvolved and mildly sceptical third party and then confirms the story. A bystander who happens to agree with the pitch is worth more than the pitch.

What all five actually run on is not stupidity or greed. It is that you are mid-sequence in an unfamiliar place and would rather not be rude. Huang and Orbach, in a 2018 study of confidence games, argue that cons succeed by inducing errors of judgment, chiefly errors that come from imperfect information and cognitive bias, rather than by exploiting a defect of character. Plenty of other accounts put greed and gullibility straight back at the centre. Theirs is the description that fits what happens on the steps at Montmartre. You do not know what a normal fare is, or what a bracelet costs, or what a Spanish plain-clothes officer looks like. Someone who does know is standing in front of you, being helpful.

Three hours, counted only while the shop is open, is a generous window in which to reconsider a currency exchange. Most of the five collapse if you give yourself thirty seconds.

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