Nepal is a very beautiful country for people to travel to. Nepal is the capital of trekking that is well known to the world.
However, with the rapid development, the criminal elements found their way into here as well you will need to be careful when you are visiting Nepal.
Here are some scams that you could face when you are in this country.
Touts
Touts are people who want to sell you things. Whether it is tourist services, travel services, souvenirs, or foods.
I just give a firm resolution by not look at them. If they keep on following me, I will just keep walking and say no to them. If you entertain them, it is like a loophole or potential for yes and this only encourages the touts to keep being persistent or even aggressive to sell things to you. This is because they think they can change your minds.
Some of us have been raised to be polite about these things so we’ll be saying things like: “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t need this now, maybe tomorrow”. And you think to yourself they’re not going to come back tomorrow. No, some of them are very serious about selling you something and they will come back tomorrow.
If these touts are really persistent and they won’t give up, the advice that I can give to you is to just run. This can be very effective as nobody wants to feel like they’re so scary that people are running from them. I think that’s a very effective method.
Hotel Security
Some of the hotels in Nepal are having security issues. What happened to my friend who travels to Nepal a few months ago was that the hotel that she accommodated been had her belongings get stolen.
The thieves went up on the rails and reach the window of the hotel room where my friend was in. They stole all her valuables and belongings including all her clothes. The only things that they leave there were the driver’s license and the car key.
Muggings
Make sure you have your belongings with you even on the street. There have been many mugging cases that happened in Pokhara and Kathmandu.
I heard one Chinese girl was punched by the snatch thieves in the nose because she wouldn’t let go of her handbag.
Even this kind of incident gives a very bad reputation to this town but seems like the local government or the police don’t want to acknowledge this. They just don’t really care about all these.
Since most of the tourists in Nepal are from China, therefore the Chinese tourists are apparently a bit easier to trick or to take advantage of by the local people.
I don’t see police patrolling on the street except for the traffic police during the day. It doesn’t make any sense to me at all because there are not many vehicles on the street. And the area is needed police to fight against crime instead of looking out for traffic. I think the government should actually pay more attention to these crimes.
Currency Exchange on The Street
There was a guy came to my female friend and asked to exchange some Chinese currency (RMB) with her. When my friend opened the wallet, he immediately took some monies out of my friend’s wallet. The guy then just pulled by a thousand Nepalese rupees and gave her five thousand back. She didn’t know it at the time that this guy was trying to scam her for her money.
When we call the police and the manager was really unhelpful he was saying something like it is your fault because you are careless. They are not willing to solve the problem but instead, they are blaming everything to the victim.
ATM
Most of the ATMs here are not working. When they do work they will be charging you $5 for each transaction which you don’t want to do that unless it’s over $200 or so. If you withdraw every day $50, you’ll be charged $5 and that is 10% of your withdrawing.
When you go to ATM, it is best for you to go during their working hour and is better at the ATM that is in the bank with a security guard standing there.
You may sometime face the electricity outage when you withdraw your money or if you enter your PIN incorrectly 3 times, your card will get swallowed by the machine. If such an incident happened, you will need to travel to a far journey to their headquarter to get back your ATM card. This can really be a mess for you.
Fake Products
There are many gear shops in the town of Nepal where you can buy fake items ranged from branded to non-branded ones. When you step into one of these gear shops to buy something, you will need to have good bargain skills or otherwise you may get scammed by paying higher prices for the item that you buy. some items you may get charged for 3 or 4 times more for the normal price.
You can get some branded products at a cheap price but when you bring back to the hotel, only then you realized the quality is of a really bad one.
One scam I came across in Nepal is –a child asking to buy some powdered milk for his baby brother. He then takes the generous tourist into the shop and chooses the biggest powder milk on the shelve. The tourist pays and gives the milk powder to the child. The child then goes back to the shop, hands the power back to the shop keeper and gets half of the money the tourist paid.
Beggars
Like most places around the world, Nepal is also never short of beggars. You can see beggars wherever you walk on the streets of Nepal.
What is the best way to deal with beggars?
I always try to practice responsible tourism this is wherever I go and one thing you don’t want to do is do handouts to beggars. If you see a child begging and you give them money, you don’t know if they’re working for a bigger boss or not. Sometimes you’ll see women or kids with babies ask you to buy them milk for the babies.
If you pity them and agree to buy them milk, they’ll take you to a pharmacy and buy the milk. The moment you leave, they will take that milk back to the pharmacy and get money for it.
If you give things to beggars, it also creates a weird dynamic between travelers and tourists versus locals. All of a sudden the local people see like all tourists are rich and having money that can give to them. When you give money or things to beggars, then you’re kind of encouraging a begging career there.
This can create a problem for the society which is already struggling to try and get their homeless into a more self-sustaining an independent livelihood.
The best thing that you can do is look into their eyes and say no when they beg from you. Eye contact is very strong and meaningful because it means that they are equals to us. You are also empowering them with the knowledge of they are independent and they are capable of being a supporting part of society.
Kid Scam
I’m not sure if you’d call this a scam, just because it’s so … enterprising! But when I was in Nepal, a nine-year-old boy ran up and asked where I was from. On saying America he asked if I had any spare change for his coin collection as he was missing just one last coin. This was the $2 coin in the USA! I’m sure he had this ready for just about every country.