Our Proclivity to Travel Inherently Exposes Us to Fraud
Typical scams people fall for while looking for a “deal”
Is it me, or are scammers developing novel and crafty ways to cheat travelers of their hard earned money with each and every passing year? It first started with gift cards and credit card scams. But you don’t have to necessarily travel for those. It has now spilled over into the realm of travel and tourism and is making everyone, tourists and tour operators alike, suspicious of each other no matter how good their intentions are.
While you can and definitely do open yourself up to scammers even when not looking for the cheapest deals, these scams generally target those looking for them. You might have noticed this typical behaviour in at least one friend of yours. They’re the ones always looking to cut corners all to save a few rupees here and there. A cheaper plane ticket, an inexpensive hotel or homestay, purchasing a product from another website for a lower price, hiring a cheaper tourist guide or tour operator, etc.
I’ve time and again noticed people getting scammed of their hard earned money whenever they tried to obtain a particular product or service through cheaper means or tried to cut corners. This is in no way a declaration that you can’t or wont get scammed otherwise, but the likelihood of getting cheated when booking a room in a 3 Star or popular 5-Star hotel Vs a new travel website is way way lower. When was the last time you got scammed at the Four Seasons?
Look, I get it. Budget tourists cannot afford, or rather do not want to stay in places such as the Four Seasons in the first place. They’re generally just looking for a small place where they can store their luggage, head out for the day, and then come back in the night to crash after all their touristy adventures are done. But that doesn’t mean you have to settle for dirt cheap prices either, you know?
Just go with your gut instinct, and if a particular deal looks shady or is a bit off, then it probably is.
Here are 5 ways in which travellers and backpackers are being scammed out of their good hard earned money just because they tried to cut corners and find a good deal while travelling:
Private bus scams
This is a huge thing in India. Private interstate bus operators thrive on the misery of passengers by intentionally not obtaining the necessary travel permits to enter other states. A very popular scheme run by these private operators is making passengers change buses mid-way during the trip in order to save costs on ‘All India Permits’. This tactic seems pretty harmless on the surface, but you feel the full force of it when you’re on an overnight journey and are jolted out of your deep slumber by the operator in the middle of the night to change buses. This scam is pulled off at the cost of passenger comfort and convenience, something they realize much later when they’ve already purchased tickets and sunken their money into the deal.
In India, each state has its own registration plate, and while one can travel all over the country with a registration plate from ones home state, the rules differ for businesses. They’re supposed to get a permit called an All India Permit so that they can operate all over the country. Instead of shelling out some extra dough to obtain such permits for their fleet, private operators craftily avoid the procedure by placing their vehicles at state borders and forcing passengers to change buses in the middle of the journey.
And this process is not even as smooth as you’d think. Besides the inconvenience caused by overnight travel, daytime travellers are made to wait on hot sultry godforsaken highways in the middle of nowhere in anticipation of the replacement bus. Tempers rage and sparks are seen flying everywhere when the new bus arrives as every minute feels like an unending hour to the waiting passengers desperate to get their weary bodies back onto their seats.
Save yourself the hassle of such mindless and needless stress by booking your bus tickets through either government run transport services or well known private operators that are smooth, efficient, and reliable.
Ticket booking scams
This happened only very recently to one of my friends. Ever checked flight tickets on one website only to see that you could have saved more had you booked them through another? Then this ones for you. Flight ticket fraud is being committed on unwitting travelers by enticing them with attractive deals that can be found nowhere else. Only after paying for and receiving the tickets, do the travellers realize they’ve been duped with counterfeit tickets, and the party committing the fraud has already taken to their heels and escaped with the victims hard earned money.
While this does not happen all the time, one has to make sure they do their due diligence while booking on websites they’ve never heard of or used before.
‘Tripadvisor’, a popular travel website reminds travellers to do their due diligence while booking tickets online. This can be achieved by researching a bit more about the company, reading the reviews and forum posts by customers online, and checking the company’s credentials.
“Conduct research on any company you’re considering purchasing tickets from; for example, are there any negative reviews or forum posts by previous customers online? Don’t just rely on one review — do a thorough online search to check the company’s credentials.”
They finally sign off the post by saying: “If tickets to your intended destination appear cheaper than any other vendor, always consider this; if it looks too good to be true, it probably is!”.
Don’t cut corners trying to save a few bucks here and there. It will only come back to bite you later when you’re in desperate situations and have nowhere else to go (there’s tons of travel nightmare videos on Youtube). Book with a well known tour operator or through the airline’s own website. The extra money saved by booking on a cheaper site is definitely not worth your sanity or peace of mind.
Airbnb/Hotel website booking scams
Gone are the days where an airport taxi driver would take you for a ride, or you’d get pick pocketed at the railway station. Now, the scam has literally moved to your place of lodging. If you book through Airbnb that is!
There’s a ton of Airbnb scams out there, some of which many scammers have literally turned into their day jobs. Fake hosts and fake listings are now almost rampant in the Airbnb ecosystem.
The most popular one of all happens to be the non-existent property scam: One where scammers list a property that they don’t own or that does not even physically exist in the real world. Scores of travellers have fallen victim to such nasty tactics putting them into a catch-22 situation. Imagine taking a cab in a new country from the airport to your Airbnb/hotel in the middle of the night only to find that it does not even exist.
Another crafty Airbnb trick to dupe travellers is by featuring classy and elegant looking property on the website, but providing them with poor, average looking rooms minus the amenities posted in the listing.
These scammers seem to literally have made a textbook method out of cheating travelers arriving on overnight flights as they know they’d be tired and hungry, have nowhere else to go at such ungodly hours, and would be forced to put with the owners nonsense at least for the night, if not more.
The third and most popular magic trick pulled out of the hats of travel website scammers is the cancellation and refund trick. However in this trick, the owner of the property is on the receiving end of the scam. The scam basically works by exploiting an Airbnb loophole. If a guest who made a booking at your property chooses to “reschedule” their booking, they then get a full refund for their booking no matter how close to the date of arrival they are. They then craftily go ahead to cancel the rescheduled booking well in advance so that they again, you guessed it, receive a 100% refund on their original booking.
The owner of the property is now left out in the lurch with two dry weekends since neither did the scammer ever move into the propety, nor did he allow anyone else to do so by booking it all to himself for two consecutive weekends, but never really using it. I don’t know what the scammer stood to gain from this one monetarily as all he/she did was sadistically deprive a host from having customers for two weekends straight, but never really gaining anything out of it.
You can read the full story here.
Bike rental scams
This usually takes place in tropical destinations where there’s a prevalent biking scene. Places like Bali, Thailand, Goa and popular destinations along the coast of South India all figure on this list.
Places with cheap hotels or homestays located a stones throw away from turquoise blue sandy beaches, a happening nightlife along a strip of coastline, and an easy going party scence where there’s not too many restrictions usually come with their own share of downsides.
One such ploy to trap unsuspecting tourists looking for a good time is the bike rental scam.
Nowadays, with Google maps and a host of other trendy navigation software readily available to you in the palm of your hand, tourists are more than eager to explore popular and off-beat destinations all on their own without enlisting the services of chauffeur driven cars or tour operators. Budget tourists would rather gladly spend that money on shopping or a hearty full-course meal instead of giving it away to car rental companies. Plus, there’s always that added bit of freedom and flexibility while driving a vehicle of your own to explore a place you’ve never been to before.
This has opened up tourists to being scammed more than ever.
The trick here is to strike a deal with a tourist for a particular price, then later change the base rate of hire when the duration of rent is extended, ultimately forcing the renter to pay almost double than what he/she originally bargained for. Try not renting at all. But if you can’t do that, always record your conversations and transactions with the executive at the bike shop and take a photo of the receipt once it is signed.
Another scheme that is regularly pulled off by unscrupulous bike renters is the good cop-bad cop trick. This one essentially works by getting a tourist to strike a deal with a workshop executive/mechanic for one price, then as the owner of the shop, feigning ignorance about the discussed price with the victim and making them pay a totally different price (which is obviously higher) when they come back to return the vehicle stating that “this is the deal which is written right here, and it’s what we charge all of our customers, I don’t know what kind of deal you made with my mechanic, that is null and void.”
Victims almost never receive redressal as the mechanic they struck the original deal with would be on a “break” or would have “left on a medical emergency to their hometown” or any variation of those two.
These shady bike rental companies are well aware that tourists visiting their city are there to have a good time, and that the last thing they’d want is filing cases and doing the rounds of police stations while on holiday. So they take full advantage of this fact and rip off tourist after tourist until someone with a bit of connections and who is daring enough puts an end to their nonsense for good.
If you’ve faced any variation of this scam, do let me know in the comments bar to the side. I’d love to know what these jerks have progressed to after being caught with one scheme after another.
Your thoughts?
Ever been scammed druing or prior to going for a holiday? What was the modus operandi of the scamster? Have you started travelling again since lockdowns have been lifted? What novel and shady new methods have these scamsters developed since travel restrictions have been lifted? Do let me know in the comments bar to the side.
