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Find yourself covered in slime? You're being mugged.

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Re: Find yourself covered in slime? You're being mugged.

#31

Post by drinian »

eru wrote: post #12
drinian wrote: post #2

I have heard of this specific scam happening in Buenos Aires as well. It's a particularly nasty one. It's unfortunate, but I would say that on my world trip about 50-60% of English-speaking locals in non-English-speaking countries were trying to get my money somehow. I feel bad for the ones who weren't, because I had to treat them with such suspicion. But, the rule is, if somebody doesn't have anything better to do t…

> But, the rule is, if somebody doesn't have anything better to do than talk to you, they're probably after your money. I have some experiences in Turkey. Outside the tourist spots, people talking to you are generally not after your money.

That's an excellent point. I always tell people that there's a huge difference between Beijing/Shanghai and the rest of China, for instance, in this regard.

I'd like to write a blog post about all the various lines I've been fed, and I'll try to emphasize that.

Re: Find yourself covered in slime? You're being mugged.

#32

Post by drinian »

alecco wrote: post #20
drinian wrote: post #2

I have heard of this specific scam happening in Buenos Aires as well. It's a particularly nasty one. It's unfortunate, but I would say that on my world trip about 50-60% of English-speaking locals in non-English-speaking countries were trying to get my money somehow. I feel bad for the ones who weren't, because I had to treat them with such suspicion. But, the rule is, if somebody doesn't have anything better to do t…

Like this kind of stuff would never happen in NYC, LA, Detroit, Baltimore...

I live in Baltimore. If someone wants your money here, they'll hurt you to get it. For whatever reason, people seem less inclined to use violence outside the US.

Re: Find yourself covered in slime? You're being mugged.

#34

Post by kragen »

drinian wrote: post #2

I have heard of this specific scam happening in Buenos Aires as well. It's a particularly nasty one. It's unfortunate, but I would say that on my world trip about 50-60% of English-speaking locals in non-English-speaking countries were trying to get my money somehow. I feel bad for the ones who weren't, because I had to treat them with such suspicion. But, the rule is, if somebody doesn't have anything better to do t…

> I have heard of this specific scam happening in Buenos Aires as well. It's a particularly nasty one.

Yes, it happened to some friends of ours visiting us here in BsAs last year. The particular squirted substance was probably some kind of ground-up plant; it left grass stains.

> But, the rule is, if somebody doesn't have anything better to do than talk to you, they're probably after your money.

This is true in tourist areas and shopping centers. So I avoid them as much as possible. In the rest of the world, especially outside of big cities, many people are perfectly happy to talk to strangers without any kind of financial exchange.

Re: Find yourself covered in slime? You're being mugged.

#35

Post by RK »

riley2 wrote: post #29

Ever wonder why you read stories in the foreign press about France, Germany, Italy or some other European country deporting its Roma (Gypsy) population? Well, now you understand why they do it. And before anyone says, "He never said they were Gyspies," he's from the U.S., doesn't speak Italian and obviously isn't savvy enough to pick them out, at least when they aren't trying to be noticed. Gypsies do stuff like this…

While I'm sure that Roma, Sinti, etc carry out a disproportionately large number of these crimes, the way they are viewed and treated in Europe is just ridiculous. It's just straight up racism and the deportations sound like pure politics.

Re: Find yourself covered in slime? You're being mugged.

#37

Post by zach »

colanderman wrote: post #23
andrewingram wrote: post #6

When I was in Rome, a couple of youths tried the old trap-the-target-in-the-ticket-barriers trick on a friend of mine. Luckily another guy I was with realised what was happening, shouted "watched out" and the two guys scarpered after giving us a cheeky shrug.

Care to elaborate on this trick? Google doesn't seem to find anything.

I believe the trick involves preventing a revolving-door turnstile from turning:

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local&id=...

Re: Find yourself covered in slime? You're being mugged.

#38

Post by focusaurus »

This sucks. The part I can't stand is that these seem to be ongoing, easily trackable/predictable crimes. I wonder if travelers would contribute to a kickstarter project to post a few people at a smaller but high-risk train station and see if it's the same small group of bandits operating repeatedly and assist the police in identifying them so they can be aprehended. Do one case study first and hopefully learn some lessons that could be applied more broadly.

Re: Find yourself covered in slime? You're being mugged.

#40

Post by limedaring »

Just wanted to post that it was pretty stupid of me to travel without travel insurance — I've been so wary of insurance scams, I don't know why it didn't occur to me that this might happen. I was thinking that travel insurance wouldn't be a benefit because I wasn't likely to get sick or hurt, which was really, really silly reasoning now.

That said, thank goodness we were in Rome for three weeks — I have a new passport book (the US Embassy is awesome), and a friend shipped me a spare laptop and phone for the remainder of our trip. We started out with a really bad event made worse by poor decisions, but at least (3 weeks later) things are going well now.

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