There’s a very good account here of a jewel-scam ring operating in Chiang Mai, up in our North. This is much more detailed than many of the stories one hears and gives a lot of good information.
The writer did not fall for it. Indeed, he strung them along for a while to see what developed before he disappeared. He did manage to get a free dinner and evening of snooker from the scammers.
It’s a bit unusual, but not unheard of, for this type of scam to operate upcountry like this. Bangkok’s the main center for operations of this sort.
One of the better scams I have heard about in a long time.
I can see how someone could easily fall for it.
The series Locked Up Abroad had an episode with young backpackers in Hong Kong taking some gold to Nepal. Seemed like a good idea at the time…needless to say, things didn’t turn out well for them. (You can watch that and other episodes here.)
I love that link, if only for one poster’s hilarious comment
It’s difficult to believe that anyone could fall for that – especially after getting to the credit card bit – but then again I’ve fallen for some pretty stupid stuff. If it’s not one thing (greed), it’s another (sympathy). Damn con artists.
How is it so great? It boils down to this:
Someone I’ve never met approaches me and says: “You can earn some quick and easy money doing something for me. All you need to do first is loan me some money. I’ll pay you back tomorrow.” Who is going to fall for that? OK, I know some people will, like some people try to get money hidden in a bank account in Nigeria, but come on!
Unless the writer is dirt poor, I don’t see how a free meal would be worth the time it took to devote an evening or two listening to people trying to con him.
It’s not always quite that simple. A lot of these people are really good at what they do. I know of victims who had heard all the warnings before they came here, read the government tourism literature – what little exists – on it upon arrival, and still they got scammed. Many times, the mark does not even consider himself a greedy person, although greed does often come into it. Some of the better con men can make the mark feel they’re really doing their newfound friend a big favor.
Of course it is a stupid deal, but they did it nice and slowly and reeled the guy in with some finesse. Most people doing this try to rush you into something, but these guys dragged it out and made every effort to seem greedy, but legit…sort of like every asshole on Wall Street.
At its heart, this is a pigeon drop scam: you get money from the mark not as a loan, but as “security” for the far more valuable package you’re entrusting him with. He’s not loaning you anything – he’s giving you $1000 in order to get a package from you worth $20,000. It’s really YOU taking the risk that he may run off with your valuable $20,000, and it’s not unreasonable at all for him to ask you for some small security against that.
Yeah, the author seems to be giving these guys too much credit. Their whole scam relied on the “How are we going to pay for the jewels? Hmmmmm… Do you have a credit card we can use??”
Pshhh, amateurs.
I could see that - tell the mark you need money as a form of bonding to show that he (the mark) is reliable. But that’s not what the scam described by the link in the OP says:
“So towards the night, their suggesting that I use my credit card to make a purchase that they will reimburse within 24 hours”. Maybe this “purchase” was presented as a type of guarantee, maybe not. From the description it sounds like they were asking him to buy the jewels he would be carrying to make the transaction less supsicious to anyone investigating why the mark would have access to a large amount of jewels, and the scammers would, of course, reimburse him the next day. I guess in this case the mark might believe it seeing as how he has the supposedly valuable items in his possession.
As with all these scams, once things go wrong, it becomes obvious how you were scammed, so the art is in being persuasive and inspiring confidence, which the con artists in the OP seemed to be good at. Also it helps to work on someone’s greed and dishonesty - a crook will be thinking “I can just take their valuable jewels and sell them myself.”