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TIFU by falling for the most obvious scam ever

This didn't happen today, but rather a few months back when I was in Thailand with my sister. This also is not a monumental fuck up at all, it could have been A LOT worse.

For context; me (20m) and my sister (22f) both never travelled outside of Europe before this. We went to Thailand together as a bit of a 'fuck it'.

We arrive in the evening, go to the Mcdonalds (this is a crime, I know). Next day we go explore Bangkok still a bit jet lagged. We are from the Netherlands and the biggest city I have ever been to is London, so Bangkok was a monster.

Before we were able to get used to it a guy approaches us in near perfect English (learned later this is red flag one). He wrote some places for us to go on a piece of paper. He then calls a over a seemingly random tuktuk driver who proceeds to accept a deal for 50THB for more than 2 hours of driving around (red flag 2). They told us it's because it's a 'national holiday'.

First, we go to a very unknown temple. It was beautiful and not touristic at all. We are enjoying it. Another 'random' local approaches. He tells us we should REALLY go look for suits in a store nearby and get advice at a tourist information spot.

We get on our way again and go to the suit store, where a (looking back) way too pushy guy gets me to buy a suit. I drove the price down a lot and, with suit in hand, don't even feel scammed by this to be honest. It's a decent suit and fits me perfectly.

We move on to the tourist information since both locals told us they could really help us. They told us the government wants to support tourism by funding this free information place. We get there and it looks a little sketch. Inside are a few desks and basically no other people except for the workers.

The guy starts out by asking where we want to go. We tell him and he immediately starts naming specific stuff. Didn't feel too off yet at this point. We thought tourist information must be nice, since in Europe these are all over the place and incredibly helpful.

He then starts offering us stuff. Eventually it comes down to 1.2k per person for the month. Sounds fine to us, since this would be considered incredibly cheap in Europe. We decide we want to think about it. He doesn't like that.

He starts making up excuses why we can't. Like he needs to book quick and we need to leave a deposit. We actually tried to pay, but I was using a debit card which declined for suspicious payment. He then took us to an ATM where he kept pushing. I then said this wasn't feeling right at all.

We decided to say we'd think about it and maybe come back tomorrow. He kept saying we couldn't and we legally had to leave a deposit otherwise he'd call his 'friends' etc. Well, eventually we were stupid enough to leave him the deposit. This came down to 100 euro's in total.

We went back to our hotel after and realized this was all sounding incredibly stupid. Looked online and within one minute found the same story like 5 times. Apparantly it's an incredibly common scam in SE Asia.

Oh well, I did get a suit that fits for 250eu. It's mostly a TIFU because it just seems sooo stupid to us now. We learned our lesson though and had an amazing trip.

I guess it's a small price to pay for something that will help us on all of our future travel.

Still can't help but feel dumb when I think about it.

​

TL;DR we believed one of the most common scams in the country we travelled to and lost 100 euro's and our self respect.

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