Tourists tell how during trips to Rome and Vienna, under the guise of tourists, scammers often began to approach city guests with a request to buy them food, citing the fact that they had run out of money.
One of the tourists, having got into an interesting situation, turned to Reddit users with a question about whether they encountered scammers while traveling to Europe.
“I was in Rome and a guy approached me. He explained that he was from Hungary and had three more days before flying home, but he ran out of money. Then he asked me to buy him pasta at a nearby place. I told him I had a limited budget, but offered him two bananas I had with me. He ended up taking them. Also, something similar happened to me on a previous trip, before the coronavirus, at the bus station in Vienna. A guy came up allegedly from the Balkans with some incoherent story about how he ran out of cash and asked me to buy him fast food at a kiosk. However, when I offered him the food I had with me, the guy got angry, calling it shitty food, “- he wrote his story.
Users of the platform explained that the man was the victim of a scam organized by shop owners to get more money. Travelers are advised to ignore anyone who comes up on the street with such requests.
“A fairly common scam in some parts of the world where scammers work with a local store. They beg you to buy some product, and when you leave, put it back on the shelf at a partner store and put the money in your pocket,” wrote one from tourists.
Another version of tourists is about beggar tourists who travel without money at someone else’s expense, they should also be ignored.