I’m going to be sharing with you some common scams that often target tourists in London. You need to know how important this is if you are planning to visit London. Actually a couple of these scams I was the target of as well. Some of my stuff was stolen including my video camera.
I’m gonna be talking about scams first on things that will rob you of your hard-earned money. Then I’m gonna be talking about thievery and tell you about my experience of having my stuff stolen here in London.
1. Currency Conversion
The common tourist scam number one would be the currency conversion. This is something that will happen to you if you are using a foreign credit card or debit card. It happened to us as soon as we got here to the airport.
I will start telling you the scam story with the ATM. When you go to an ATM and try to withdraw some cash with your foreign card, the ATM will kindly offer to
withdraw it in your local currency instead of Great British pounds.
So if you are from the USA, when you put your credit card into the ATM, it will prompt you with a message and said, “Hey, instead of withdrawing 300 Great British pounds, the ATM could withdraw US dollars for you and you don’t have to pay that foreign conversion fee that your bank will charge.”
“And for the convenience of this, we’re just gonna charge you 12%.”
Now, most banks charge somewhere between 1% to 3% for currency conversion.
To give you an example, I pressed “No” and took out money as Great British pounds, 300 Great British pounds in US dollars was $362. Great British pounds that offer by the ATM in US dollars was $410. So just by press the “Yes” button, and accepting this offer I would have been scammed out of $50.
So if you are standing in front of an ATM, make sure you do not select the currency conversion.
The same thing is happening at the point of sale terminals. If you are at Selfridges, Harrod’s or other high-end department stores, you will see these same things.
If you are buying something and want to pay via credit card when you put your credit card at the point of sale terminal, it will come up and ask, “Hey, do you want to make this purchase in Great British pounds or your local currency?”
Here’s the picture of actually what it looks like.
At Selfridges when we told the staff we weren’t interested in the currency conversion and we wanted to pay in Great British pounds instead, the lady says, “well, you know what, Selfridges recommends that you take it out in your local currency.”
Do you know why they recommend it? Because they make a lot of money on those currency conversions!
And you might just be pressing the “YES” button when the staff asks you to do because you think that’s what you have to do to make the purchase. Actually, on this point of sale terminals, you should insist on paying with Great British pounds and not pay with your local currency. What you can do is to push the red “CANCEL” button. And they purposely make it seem like you are canceling your transaction if you press the “CANCEL” button, in fact, you’re just saying no to this lousy offer but it will still proceed with your transaction.
2. Newspaper Distraction
The second scam is called the newspaper distraction. This happens when you’re seated outside at a restaurant or a cafe. But it actually could happen inside as well.
Anytime you’re seated at a table and you have got your valuable items in front of you on the table like a cellphone or camera, what happens is some friendly strangers may come up and sit down at your table.
They will put their newspaper on top of the table and start asking you something like, “Hey, how’s it going? Where are you from?”
You kind of brush them off because you are not interested in talking to them, or you are interested in talking to them but when they leave they pick up their newspaper and your stuff.
So if anybody comes to your table and puts down a newspaper, you should be concerned and make sure you didn’t have anything valuable that was under it. You shouldn’t put any valuable item on your table and let it sit there because when people see valuables in London, it will become a target for the crooks
and they would like to take it away from you.
3. Contactless Skimming
This one happens, particularly on the Tube. With the rise in contactless card use to enter the Tube, meaning you don’t just have to enter with your Oyster card, you can enter the Tube, the London Underground or the subway with a contactless Visa card.
So when you are using the contactless cards, there are people who will come up alongside you. They will watch you use your contactless card and when you put it in your pocket, they’ll brush up against your side with a contactless card reader and skim your card. Then, they will use your card to buy things.
Even though the contactless card limit is only 30 pounds, and so it’s not a lot of money, but the way you can prevent that is by using some RFID blocking sleeves
or get an Oyster card that doesn’t have that much money on it without the need to carry a contactless card with you.
4. Pedicabs and Rickshaws Scams
When you are in London, you should beware of pedicabs and rickshaws, particularly the area around Covent Garden.
Why the rickshaws and the pedicabs?
They are basically unregulated and they just sit around waiting on tourists who don’t speak English very well. There is no set rate for a pedicab or rickshaw in London so they can charge you as much as they want to. That five-minute ride might end up costing you 50 Great British pounds.
If you are going to take a pedicab, make sure you negotiate the price upfront and be pretty firm about it. If I were you I would just walk or take a taxi and avoid the pedicabs entirely.
5. Getting Fake Hop-On Hop-Off Bus Tickets
You need to beware of where you buy your hop-on hop-off bus tickets. The problem with this is a lot of hop-on hop-off bus tickets are sold by people on the street but they might not be the people that work for the company. They might just be selling you their own tickets and when you get to get on the bus, only you realized that they are not the tickets for the bus.
Therefore, if you want to do a hop-on hop-off bus tour, the best place for you to buy them is to go to an actual physical location. You can first confirm that it is the legit location. Because if it’s not the right ticket when you get on the bus, you can come back to them and ask, “dude, what’d you sell me?”
6. Help With Ticket Machine
Be careful of people who are too friendly and too helpful in the train stations. A common scam is people helping you at a ticket machine or a parking machine where you have to use your credit card or money. They might be helping themselves out with your wallet while they are distracting you on the machine and if they’re not helping themselves to your wallet, they may be helping themselves to your ATM or your debit card when you put it in the machine.
When you’re putting in your pin card, they’ll be watching as you put in your PIN number. Then they’ll distract you somehow. While they do that they’ll take your debit card, pocket it for themselves and tell you that the machine ate your card.
7. Fake Show Tickets
You should also beware of people on the street who are trying to sell you theater tickets. There’s a lot of theater shows in London, and particularly the theater district where a lot of people will approach you with discount tickets.
They may offer you the ticket with half-priced, or they may offer you the VIP tickets. You shouldn’t buy any theater tickets from anybody on the street. If you want to watch any show, you should buy them from the TKTS booth which is in Leicester Square or from the actual theaters.
Now you might be saying, “What if I get a really good deal?” You know really good deals are usually too good to be true and sometimes the other ticket vendors, they might tell you things like these are VIP tickets or they’re special tickets. But usually, it turns out they’re really not that VIP.
8. Fake Designer Goods
Beware of fake designer goods in street markets. Most of the times a lot of street markets will camp the target, in particular, is one of them. If you find designer goods that are really cheap like that Louis Vuitton handbag that’s 50% off, chances are it’s not a real Louis Vuitton handbag.
Also, something that happens in the street markets which are having fake auctions. You’ll be walking by and a bunch of people will be bidding on something, but it’s not really a real auction. They’re just trying to get the excitement up so that they hope you bid on it too. If you don’t really pay attention to the fact that it’s actually not a real article.
But it’s a Louis Vuitton purse and it’s 20 pounds, you wanna get that right? Well, you won’t be scammed, why? Because I have told you so!
9. Thief
This one is important. A common tourist scam whether it is a scam or illegal is theft. We’ll start with pick-pockets first.
Pick-pocketing is super prevalent in London. be it pick-pocketing wallets or pick-pocketing things out of your bags. You really need to be careful to make sure you know where your things are and you don’t have any things that say rob me immediately.
I would recommend you to buy an anti-theft bag and carry it with you. For me, I personally like bags from Pacsafe. We’re gonna talk about that a little bit. I have had these bags for nearly 10 years and they’ve never been pick-pocketed from the bag. So, in this case, my bag was stolen entirely but we can talk about solutions about how to solve that.
Another type of theft is moped theft. What happens here is you’ll be standing around and using your cellphone. When you’re using your cellphone on the street or the sidewalk, somebody will come up on a moped. It’s often two people on the moped where one person’s driving it and the second person’s on the back. The second person is just there to grab your phone out of your hands as they continue to go by on the moped. And yes you saw who did it, but you can’t chase after them because they’re already gone by the time you compose yourself.
If you are standing around and you’re looking at your phone, maybe stand by a wall or don’t take your phone out at all. If you like to talk on your phone a lot, maybe use some wireless earbuds and keep your phones in your pocket.
There have been signs across the city to warn people about moped thefts that have happened in that area. You could imagine that they do it for your phone, they will do it for your bag as well. If you have a shoulder bag, try to put your bag on the side that’s away from the street and not towards the street.
So I would like to talk about a thing that happened to me where my entire bag was got stolen. It happened at a restaurant that is situated between Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Circus. We were seated outside but our table was right next to the building of the restaurant.
It was about 7:45 in the evening, we had just sat down to eat. I had a big shopping bag of some stuff, and I had my camera bag and I put it just to the left of my leg on the floor. In eyesight so that when I’m looking at the table I can see my bag just down here and I’m like well it’s between my left leg and the wall so this is a
pretty good place for my bag. Well between the time I put my bag there and five minutes later my bag was gone.
I looked down, I went to take out Topher to take a picture of Topher and realized that Topher which was my lovely traveling panda was gone, along with my camera and everything that was in the bag.
They left the big shopping bag there because that was too big for them to get out. But the camera bag that I had on top of it was gone.
Now I mentioned it was in my eyesight, so what actually happened?
Well, at some point the bag’s right down here that I can see it and at some point the waitress comes to take my order and now I’m looking at the waitress who’s taking my order. I know that is when that bag disappeared.
Didn’t see it, didn’t notice it, but as soon as I noticed it there were some people who said, “yeah, there was somebody behind you, he went that way but we didn’t notice that he took anything.”
People were sitting at a table just to the next of us who are actually kind of like at a counter looking at us. But they didn’t see anything.
It really sucks and I hate them for doing it. So what should I have done better and what could you have done better?
Well, I mentioned I carry this Pacsafe metro safe bag but what I did wrong was it wasn’t chained down. When we went to the police station to file a police report about it the taxi driver basically was like, “Yeah, anything in London now that’s not chained down it’s basically gone.”
And the Pacsafe bags, they’re a shoulder bag and it has a strap that’s designed to detach. So you can loop it around something and then reconnect it again. I should have looped that around the chair, and so that way if they went to take it, it wouldn’t go because the shoulder strap would be connected to the chair.
Another option, put your shoulder strap of your bag, or your backpack around your leg, or the leg of the chair, or I should keep the bag on my lap even though it’s uncomfortable.
I’m seated outside and if I had my arm looped through that shoulder strap, they would not have been able to take it the way they take.
These criminals are not happening by force. I said I was robbed, and it wasn’t robbery because it wasn’t at gunpoint and it wasn’t at knifepoint. They don’t wanna be noticed and so they’re gone before I even noticed.
When we called the police, what’s there to do about it? Nothing.
Oh, and a lot of people said, “Hey, you should have looked in the trash cans or the dumpsters because the crook might have thrown your bag in there.”
We actually spent about 30 or 45 minutes after the bag was stolen kind of combing a three-block radius just going further and further out looking in the trash
cans and the dumpsters hoping that the bag was there and in our case, it wasn’t.
But many people said they’ve been pick-pocketed, many of the fellow explorers said when their bags were stolen, they were able to find them in a nearby dumpster. I can replace the camera but unfortunately, our good friend Topher is not as replaceable as those electronic items.
When you come to London, don’t let your guard down. Don’t think, “You know what, this place seems pretty safe I don’t have to pay the same amount of attention to
my stuff as I might in Italy or Paris because I look at those places and I know everybody’s trying to rob me.”
But you know what, in London, everybody’s trying to rob you here too. It’s really unfortunate but it is the case. So please learn from me and don’t be a victim yourself.