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How to Get Out of a Scam That Has Already Started

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A narrow lamplit old-town street at dusk with two figures approaching ahead

A narrow lamplit old-town street at dusk with two figures approaching ahead

The Questura di Firenze has published a physical description of the fake policeman's badge. It is round, it is plastic, and the word stamped on it is either POLICE or INTERNATIONAL POLICE. The force's advice to visitors is not to inspect it more carefully. It is to insist instead on seeing the officer's personal identity card, on the grounds that the people running this particular routine generally do not carry forged documents at all.

That is worth more than any quantity of general vigilance, because it tells you what the encounter is made of. Not a criminal mastermind. A prop, a script, and a strong preference for keeping the conversation moving.

Almost everything written about street scams is written for the minute before. This is about the minute after: the bracelet already knotted at your wrist, the figure already said out loud, the helpful stranger already matching your stride. That minute has rules of its own, and they have less to do with nerve than with format. You are being held inside a format, and leaving means breaking it. Breaking it badly is how people end up shouting in a doorway at two in the morning.

Selected before you spoke

In 1981 Betty Grayson and Morris Stein published a study in the Journal of Communication built out of sixty people filmed at random as they walked through one of the highest-assault districts of New York City. The tape was black and white and it carried no sound. Prisoners convicted of assaulting strangers watched it and rated each walker as a target. The researchers then put the footage through Labananalysis, a formal movement-notation system, and found four things that separated the people the prisoners picked from the people they let pass: stride length, the way body weight shifted from step to step, whether the walk moved the whole body or only part of it, and whether the feet swung forward or were lifted. Nobody on that tape said a word. The sorting ran entirely on how a body was moving.

Street operators are doing a cheaper version of the same thing, and the police who deal with them are unsentimental about it. The Questura di Rimini's anti-pickpocketing advice includes the instruction to be wary of people who present as excessively kind, because that is a stratagem for getting close to you, and the observation that thieves normally work in twos: one to distract, one to lift. The Florence guide sketches the confidence trickster in more detail. He may be alone or paired, he may be a woman, he is not violent, he is usually well dressed, articulate and apparently educated, he uses cordial manners, and he often tells complicated stories full of hard-to-follow terms for the specific purpose of confusing you.

That inverts the folk model. The complicated explanation is not context, it is the weapon, and the friendliness is not a lucky break in a strange city. Once you accept that warmth and detail are the mechanism rather than the atmosphere, disengaging stops feeling rude, which is the thing that stops most people.

A woven thread bracelet knotted around a wrist as another hand withdraws

State one: it is already in your hand

You have a bracelet, a sprig of rosemary, a CD, a small carved thing. Someone put it there and is now smiling and waiting.

The law here is clearer than people assume. Annex I to the European Union's Unfair Commercial Practices Directive lists practices banned in all circumstances, and point 29 catches the trader who supplies you something you never asked for and then wants money for it, or wants it back, or wants you to keep it safe. The United Kingdom now runs its own version: Schedule 20 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, in force since April 2025, which replaced the old 2008 regulations and renumbered everything. The unsolicited-goods ban sits at paragraph 31, and it covers demanding that you pay for the item, return it, or store it safely.

Now the honest part. That is consumer law. It binds traders, it is enforced by regulators, and in the UK section 237 of the same Act converts all but three of the Schedule 20 practices into criminal offences, paragraph 31 among the ones it keeps. It is still not a spell you cast on a pavement, and the man who tied the string is very often not a trader any regulator will ever reach. What the rule gives you is not leverage over him. It is the removal of the small guilty voice suggesting you owe something. You do not.

Which frees you to do the boring physical thing. Do not hand the object back into his hand. The handover is a second contact, it gives him a second grip, and it is where the pantomime of injured feelings begins. Put it down on a flat surface, a wall, a step, the edge of his own bag, say no once, and keep walking the line you were already walking. Do not raise your voice. Do not explain. Explanation is an invitation to continue, and continuing is all he wants.

One regional wrinkle worth knowing, because it reverses who is exposed. In Italy the final purchaser of counterfeit goods commits an administrative offence in their own right, under a provision of a 2005 decree as later amended, with confiscation of the goods on top. Buying the obvious fake off a sheet on the pavement in Florence or Venice is not a small act of charity with a bad handbag attached. It is the one move in the whole exchange that puts you personally on the wrong side of a statute.

State two: a number has been said out loud

This is the dangerous one, because the correct move is the opposite of the instinctive one. You are inside something now: a bar you were walked to, a shop the driver detoured to, a carpet room, a gem counter. A figure has appeared that bears no relation to anything you agreed. The doorway has acquired a man.

Start with the strongest fact available. Annex I point 24 of the same European directive puts one item on the banned-in-all-circumstances list in these words: "Creating the impression that the consumer cannot leave the premises until a contract is formed." Schedule 20 paragraph 26 repeats it for the UK, word for word. So the blocked doorway is not a grey area anywhere in the European Union. It is prohibited outright, everywhere, with no weighing up required.

The invented penalty is a different animal, and it is worth keeping the two apart rather than waving at both. It is not on the banned-outright list at all. It lands under Article 9, which tells enforcers deciding whether a practice was aggressive to weigh the timing, location, nature and persistence of what was done, any threatening or abusive language, and, tellingly, "any threat to take any action that cannot legally be taken." That is a factor in a judgement, not an automatic breach. And note what the directive does not settle: it leaves the penalties to each member state, so whether any of this is a crime rather than a regulatory matter is precisely the thing that changes at the border. Banned everywhere is not the same as criminal everywhere.

And now the correction that matters more than any of it, because getting this wrong is how a bad night becomes a police cell. Walking out silently is not automatically safe. In England and Wales, section 3 of the Theft Act 1978 makes it an offence to make off without paying where payment on the spot is required or expected, done dishonestly and with intent to avoid the amount due. There is a carve-out at subsection 3, and it is much narrower than it sounds: it reaches supplies that are contrary to law, and services of a kind the law will not enforce payment for at all. A bar that actually poured you the drinks supplied a lawful service. Your quarrel is with the price, not with whether any debt exists, so that carve-out is not the door you were hoping for. What is genuinely arguable on those facts is that you were not dishonest and had no intent to avoid paying what was actually due. That is an argument, not a shield. It gets decided later, by someone else, on evidence about what was in your head. Whether an equivalent offence exists in the country you are standing in is a question with a different answer almost everywhere, which is exactly why the silent exit is the wrong default. It is the one move that can convert a commercial dispute into a criminal allegation against you.

The move that works almost everywhere is slower and much less satisfying. Do not leave silently and do not pay in full. Say, calmly and repeatedly, that you dispute the bill, that you want it itemised in writing, and that you will settle whatever price was actually displayed. Then call the police yourself, in front of them, and say so as you dial. The entire business model depends on you being the person who does not want the authorities involved. Reverse that and most of the room's power drains out of it. If a card machine appears, do not let your card leave your hands, and do not tap anything to make the moment end.

Tokyo shows why the geography matters, and it also shows how easily the wrong rule gets quoted at you. Under the Tokyo Metropolitan Public Nuisance Prevention Ordinance, the Public Safety Commission designates zones in which one narrow act is regulated: waiting in a public place, in a manner visible to passers-by, for someone to solicit. Not approaching. Waiting. And every purpose it covers belongs to the sex trade, touting for sex-related premises, touting for the sort of place where opposite-sex staff provide indecent hospitality alongside the drinks, and scouting people to work in those businesses or to appear in adult videos. The designated list is written in chome, the numbered sub-district blocks, and takes in Kabukicho 1 and 2 chome, Roppongi 3 to 7 chome, and blocks across Ikebukuro, Ueno and Shibuya.

None of which covers the friendly man saying the bar is just downstairs. He is caught by a different rule, and Shinjuku ward wrote it precisely because the metropolitan ordinance did not reach him. Since 2013 the ward's by-law on soliciting in public places has banned singling one person out of the passing crowd and inviting them to an izakaya, a karaoke place, a hostess club or a host club, and banned street scouting, and banned loitering about waiting to do either. It is drawn with real care about where the line falls. Handing leaflets to everybody who walks past is fine. Standing outside your own shop calling out to nobody in particular is fine. Selecting you is the part that is prohibited, and since June 2016 the ward can name and fine anyone who ignores its warnings. Carry that distinction into the street: the tell is not that he is talking. It is that out of a crowd, he picked you.

A hand holding a printed bill on a table next to a phone with its keypad open

State three: someone is walking beside you

The tuk-tuk version begins with information. The US Embassy and Consulate in Thailand's own list of scams describes people who approach on the street to persuade you that a temple, museum or site is closed today, and who then offer to show you somewhere else nearby, which turns out to be a gem or clothing shop. The embassy's flat advice is to trust the published opening hours rather than the stranger, and it adds a fact worth carrying: neither the Thai government nor the royal family owns, operates or sponsors any gem or jewellery shop, so any sale described that way is a lie at the first sentence.

The mechanic underneath is much the same in every city. A walking conversation tends to be the preferred format because it is private, it has momentum, and it ends at a second location the other party chose. The countermove is not a clever line. It is to stop moving. Stop, turn to face them squarely, and put your back to a shop window or a wall in a place with other people in it. The rhythm breaks, and a great deal of this work depends on rhythm. Say no once. Do not answer the question, because answering is participation. If they keep pace, walk into a hotel lobby, a bank, a pharmacy, a department store: a business with staff, cameras and a manager. Few people running this trade want their face on a security recording during a scene.

Never accept the transfer. The offered lift, the shortcut, the friend's shop, the better bar: each of those is a request to move to ground the other party controls. Where a driver is involved, give the exact destination and refuse the scenic extension, which is the embassy's advice almost word for word.

The uniform problem

Impostor police invert everything above: here the pressure to comply is the pressure to be law-abiding.

Florence's guidance is the most concrete published version of the countermove. Insist on the officer's personal identification, not the badge. Beyond that, be careful about universal answers, because this is a field where rules genuinely differ by country. Whether adults must carry identity documents, whether an officer may demand to see them in the street, and what a legitimate card looks like all vary. What travels well is narrower: your wallet does not leave your hands, your passport does not leave your hands, you do not get into a vehicle, and any fine to be paid is paid at a station or a bank rather than on a kerb. Proposing to continue the conversation at the nearest police station is a request a genuine officer has little reason to object to.

What the phone is for

Have the number before you need it, because it is not the same everywhere. 112 reaches emergency services free of charge from any fixed or mobile phone across the European Union, and it is the only number that works in every member state, though several countries keep national numbers running alongside it, which is why Italian police literature still prints 113. Japan uses 110 for police, and the Tokyo force tells non-Japanese speakers that an interpreter will be brought onto the line, with #9110 kept for anything that is not an emergency. Thailand runs a separate tourist police line on 1155, with the general police on 191, and the US Embassy and Consulate in Thailand sends people to 1155 first for the reason it gives on the page: those officers "have experience dealing with tourist scams and can inform you of the proper way to proceed."

Know also what your own government will not do. The UK's Consular Charter is refreshingly plain about it: staff will listen, assess your needs and explain clearly how they can and cannot help, some services carry a fee, and the premise it opens from is that your own safety is your own responsibility, along with reading and obeying the local law. A consulate is not an intervention service that arrives at a carpet shop. It is a phone number for after.

The Questura di Venezia has set up a stand outside Santa Lucia station and handed arriving visitors English-language brochures about pickpockets and the three-boxes game, with a QR code that opens a video showing how the trick is actually run. That is the right instinct, and it is the whole method compressed into one object. Florence's guide, describing the same shell game under its three local names, offers the only line anyone needs on the subject: you always lose.

The performance only works on an audience that has not seen it before. Having seen it, you are not obliged to applaud, or to explain, or to be liked by the person running it. Put the thing down and keep walking. It is a much smaller ask than it feels like at the time.

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