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What would you do?
I was in Istanbul last month. I saw two people being scammed.
Here's the setup. Istanbul's tourist district is full of scammers. They prey on naïve Westerners who are good people, and thus believe that other people are good people too. On the first day, I was standing near
Hagia Sophia with my sister, looking lost. A scammer slithers up and says "The Mosque is closed. Where are you from?" My sister, a sweet and innocent person, answers honestly. "Seattle". The scammer is smooth. "I love the fish market. I used to drive a Penske truck near there for my carpet business." He's not letting us talk and he's trying to get us to do something. I'm not sure what. After a little back and forth I blurt out, implausibly, "we're busy", grab my sister and walk away to a stream of insults from the scammer.
I figured that he just wanted to charge us for an overpriced tour. Searching online, I realized it's worse. After giving you a "free" tour, they try to get you into their carpet or art shop. "I just need to pick something up. Please come in." Free food and tea is given, as well as a hard sell on an overpriced carpet. At this point, the tone changes, and people might feel forced to buy a carpet because of the "implications".
After our encounter, I was hyperaware of this sort of scam and I think I saw it happen twice.
The first time, I saw a tourist woman being led by a Turkish man. After following them for a couple blocks, they entered this ceramics shop. I kept walking.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Testi+seramik/
The next day, on nearly the exact same block, I saw another woman being led by a Turkish man. This time, the destination was an ATM machine. The woman withdrew some cash while the man stood back doing weird air punches. They headed the other way and were gone.
What, if anything, should I have done? I wasn't 100% sure that the women were being scammed. And, of course, by intervening I could have put my own safety at risk as well as the safety of the women.
In the United States, I would have called the police at a minimum. I might also ask the women if they needed help, or even just "accidentally" bump into them and strike a conversation. Here, I felt paralyzed. In the end, I wasn't worried for the women's safety. But I could see they were going to have a bad and very expensive day. I suppose I also felt disgusted at Turkish people for allowing this as well as disgust at the women for being so obvilious. Not sure there's a right answer here. I just want to see what people think.
When I worked at K-Mart in college our official training told us that if we suspect a customer is shoplifitng, ask if they need any help with anything. You aren't accusing them of anything and if they have individual contact with an employee that's often enough to make them think that the store is on to them and put back whatever it was they were taking. I'd take a similar tack here. Unless you're seriously introverted it's not too hard to find a reason to strike up a conversation with a stranger; ask for directions, a restaurant recommendation, the time, anything. From there you can ask the tourist where they're from and what they're up to and if they tell you that this gentleman is offering a personalized tour tell them that you have to be careful because there are scams out there though you're sure this gentleman probably wouldn't do anything of the sort personally. Just outline the scam and it will be pretty hard for the tourist to get caught up in it.
I'm not familiar with this particular scam but when I lived in the city people would often pull the one where they claim they ran out of gas in a bad area where their car is blocking traffic and need ten bucks or whatever to buy a gas can. I saw some people about to be taken by it before and I'd intervene by butting in and telling the guy that I had a gas can for my lawnmower just up at my house and if he could wait a few minutes I'd be happy to give him a free gallon, which I would have been had the guy actually been out of gas. This was usually enough to get the marks to walk away thinking the situation was under control while the guy cursed me out after I told him to follow me. Once it happened to me when my roommate and I were walking through a dicey area on the way home from a football game. The guy claimed his car was stuck on a busy four-lane road and we offered to help him push and started walking in the general direction of where he said the car was. This guy pretended to get a call and told me his buddy was on the way and not to worry about it.
Haha. I've done that too. "There's an auto parts store just down the road. Let's go walk there and I'll buy you one!".
The petty scams in America are just so pathetic compared to what you see in Europe. How come, despite having a huge population of marks, we don't seem to have a dedicated scammer class in the U.S. like they do in Europe? Pickpocketing is practcially non-existent and the scams are so amateurish. A country like Hungary would do well to export their Romanis to the U.S. by helping them gain asylum. Hungary would benefit. The Romanis would benefit. U.S. liberals would cherish the opportunity to interact with another underclass.
Edit in response to replies: Yes the U.S. has other scams. Presumably Europe has those other same scams too. Nevertheless it's interesting that some varieties of scam seem to exist in Europe but not the U.S. It would be a lot easier to pickpocket in the U.S. than Europe. A handful of Romani in SF could really do some damage. People are rich as Croesus, they don't try to protect their wallet, and crime is legal. I have literally never been the target of pickpockets in the U.S. and I wear my wallet in my back pocket with no paranoia whatsoever. In Europe, I have twice had people try despite much better protection of valuables.
For the amount of effort they put into scams, they would legitimately make more money working a typical sales job in the US. Also MLM exists here and scams do happen in tourist heavy urban cores like in NYC.
Scams like anything else that is reliably profitable in the US are institutionalized and optimized. I work in anti-fraud and identity theft. Pick-pocketing and other meat-space crimes are high effort/medium risk/medium-high reward. People in meat space have to scout a mark, have a plan and a partner or two, make a move, and be ready to bail out. High effort is for people without other options.
Scams in the US as discussed are mostly internet based or have some nexus with technology, like card skimmers. Roma clans in the EU can't really get their people into retail cashier roles reliably enough to start a skimmer ring, and even if they did they'd need to sell their illegally obtained credentials to an OC group of some sort or have a separated org in place to try to "card" (use the creds for transactions) themselves. In the US these operations are specialized and separated with OC managing most of the interactions. Creds are harvested by desperate retail workers, passed in bulk to a middle man, then the carding work farmed out to more desperate poor folks, illicit merchandise moved into fencing networks etc. The parts of the scam exposed to the most risk, skimming and carding, are done by poor people with few options often drawn from the ranks of chronic petty criminals who don't know enough to ever flip on anyone.
Ideally none of this is needed at all and you just phish the creds with phony emails/texts/look-alike websites, malicious 'public' wifi routers in crowded areas etc. Our high tech world has cut out a lot of the people from these operations. Most people probably don't think of computers as taking jobs away from criminals, but they very much have. There is still a pretty good market for pro shoplifters to move in demand product, but actually stealing physical items in meat-space at the individual level has been largely innovated away. Cargo theft of entire trailers or shipping containers, internal frauds like paying for fake vendor work or non-existent products are still popular, but most scams are tech based now and all require some level of OC involvement at scale. The sweet spot is extremely low effort, very low risk, low but steady rewards: phishing emails/texts, scam listings on craig's list or facebook, anything that can be semi automated with an actual person only coming in at the very end of the scam after the marks have gone through tech based filters for credulousness to make sure only the stupidest marks ever get to speak to a person for the highest scam efficiency of labor. If you ever find yourself speaking to a scammer, congratulations you've made it though the filter designed to weed out everyone of average or above intelligence (or you answered a phone call from someone you don't recognize, is alone is enough to filter for "pretty dumb" by itself*), if you really want to try to hit back in some way, all you can really do is waste their time. Drag it out, make is seem like you are always about to have the money, but never do. Bonus points if you're 'sold' to another scammer when the first gets tired.
*cold call phone scamming was diminishing for a while from 2008-2016 or so but has come back strong in recent years as it now provides the dummy-filter needed for the very low effort/low but consistent reward scam meta right now. Enough people know to not do it, mobile providers operate ok-ish block lists (they are generally weeks behind the curve), and users have tech options on their end. People that answer cold calls are reliably gullible enough now its worth staffing actual people for this one again. Did you know you can pay the IRS with Amazon/Apple gift cards? Remember to buy them with cash only or they wont work!
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