Well, roaming charges in and of themselves are a complete scam (they are priced hundreds/thousands of times higher than the actual cost to provide the service, and all the carriers do it to each other because they know it's a gold mine), but I agree--that is a topic for a completely separate thread. ;)

And seems like Google Fi is making an ambitious step to avoid it :)

So that's how it works. I have been in Istanbul for 4 days and every time I passed a shoeshine guy his brush dropped. It was even the same guy more than once! Lol. First day I pointed to the brush but didn't stop, not sure if it was a scam. Just couldn't figure out how it worked.

In Thailand someone will walk up to you on the street and ask if you speak English. When you say yes they will ask if they can walk with you and practice their English. Claiming they are a student or something. After a few minutes they will thank you and offer to pay you for your time. The payment is that they have an uncle with a jewelry store and he'll give you a tremendous deal on loose stones to pay you for helping. You can figure out the rest.

The worst situation I had in BKK was with a guy who wouldn't stop. I was getting worried as he wouldn't take no for an answer and seemed aggressive, but then right in front of us, a bus crashed into a car and the police got involved, etc., and it gave me the chance to finally get away! Otherwise seemed pretty routine, the usual taxi stuff and so on.

Back in the 90's, we lived in Atlanta & some family came to visit. We took them to a museum just outside the downtown core (can't remember the name now), and as I pulled into the parking lot, a guy in a safety vest walks up to the car. He has a handful of paper parking tickets in his hand, like the ones that you leave on your dash in a parking garage.

He tells me that it's $5 to park, so I hand him the money and he gives me a ticket. Tells me to put it on my dash, then points out an empty spot ahead on my left.

Something felt weird about the whole exchange, so as we walked into the lobby I stopped at the security guard and asked if they had always charged for parking, or whether it was a new thing....?

He said "Damnit!!! Again??" and ran outside.

I just had to laugh. I hated getting ripped off, even for such a small amount, but I had to admire the audacity!

I'm not entirely sure how common this is, but last year I drove to Algeciras and went to park in the port's car park (intended to take the ferry to Ceuta and cross into Morocco). As I pulled in some men in hi-vis jackets flagged me down and showed me an available parking space...except, it was a port loading zone with a clearway sign on it. I stopped there anyway, mostly because I was so thrown by the whole thing, and they proceeded to ask for 20 euros.

At this point I drove away and they got very aggressive. I was in a GB plated car and they were specifically looking for non-Spanish plates (they had seemingly already scammed a French-plated car which would most likely wouldn't have been there when they returned to it).

Police showed up five minutes later and of course they were nowhere to be seen.

Anyway, moral of the story is: Watch out if your car's registration plates mark you as a tourist.

This scam reminds me that the challenge of being an obviously foreign tourist is that you want to shut down scammers quickly but at the same time you must remember that some people people see you as an ambassador of your (presumed) home country and are genuinely curious. In South Korea, for example, I have been asked countless times by taxi drivers, passengers on trains, etc., "Do you speak English?" They then wish to practice their English with me, nothing more. Assuming I have time and energy I am happy to help anyone who asks in genuine interest of learning. In South Korea, at least, scammers are rare. The streets of Hong Kong, for example, are a totally different place....

Yes, I found this in South Korea - in fact, from pretty much the moment I arrived at Incheon! I have some great photos of people I chatted too for hours. Found it in the more remote parts of Sri Lanka, too (and SW China).

The difficult one to figure out is Morocco. There's a lot of touts around, but they're generally a friendly bunch, and have a decent sense of humour. I had a great time with a group of touts in Fes who (after a while deciding we weren't going to fall for it) drank some tea with us, and showed us their tricks on other passing tourists.

Out in the country, there were people who would stop and chat (always in French). You'd often end up drinking tea and having a friendly chat, occasionally you'd be shown something that was for sale, but if you weren't interested, they quickly dropped it, but the hospitality continued.

Pakistan was the extreme of hospitality, though. Coming across the border from India, you're slightly defensive of touts, but this quickly goes. We were led into the most amazing little mosques, mobbed arriving off minibuses, shown the tricks of competitive kite flying, and drank endless cups of cardamom tea. Wonderful place - I take the events that have happened there since my visit quite personally.

Folks in Japan will often want to chat in English, too, and fortunately you don't have to worry that it's a scam. Typically it's younger adults and kids/teens but I've also found senior-citizen age Japanese men can be very chatty at times - I guess old guys like to tell stories the world over! My wife and I have several pictures of school groups and others that we talked with. Some have been helpful in letting us polish up our very poor attempts at Japanese.

The touts in Istanbul can be entertaining - fairly amiable for the most part compared to some locales. We generally just ignore touts when walking past but one guy hawking some sort of bus tour caught our attention. For whatever reason he first tried German on us, then English...but in various English "accents" - American, Australian, Irish...he was actually pretty good considering English wasn't even his first language, so we stopped to tell him so.

There was one guy in Istanbul who pulled the "mosque is closed but let me show you something else" bit, which we very politely declined. He then started loudly shouting about "arrogant Americans who don't like Muslims". That was the only unpleasant encounter we've had in Turkey which has very friendly people IME.

That hasn't been my experience in Japan. Granted, I've spent almost all my time in country in Tokyo where perhaps big-city people are jaded. Nearly all I've met are polite but disinterested. A few, particularly older men of the war generation, have been borderline hostile. Never a scam, though. Personal integrity is valued strongly.

There certainly ARE scams there, if nothing else of the "absurdly inflated bar bill shakedown" variety. One of my dumber coworkers fell afoul of that one. I don't recall if a tout was involved.

I agree. I had a couple people in Thailand last year want to practice English with me. Nothing came out of it other than them asking where I was from, what I do for a living, and how old I was.

If it becomes too involved, you can always excuse yourself.

Yes

San Francisco. You'll see a poor art student working on a beautiful drawing. You compliment him, he then asks if you have any extra change for art supplies. I fell for it once, but then stood behind the guy eating lunch watching him scam tons of others. He never actually drew anything, just had the pencil poised and must've bought it from an actual artist.

Kind of off topic, but when traveling to cruise ports always go to the last stall first. He sells the same products, but for 1/2 the price and will still negotiate from there. Also, every excursion is at least 50% cheaper on non cruise ship days.