SCAMMED
On various trips over the years I have been suffered robberies or attempted robberies a number of times. An old lady canvassing for money for the poor showed me the heartbreaking need of orphans on a sheet of paper in a restaurant in Barcelona and slipped the wallet, that I had taken out to pay, into her pocket. In a locked room with bars on the open windows 15 feet away in Rishikesh, India, while I dozed off sitting on my bed, someone lifted my wallet. In a train in India a crowd rushed through just before my train left and in the hubbub and shoving my computer disappeared. A woman in Barcelona managed to get the elastic band that held my money pouch below my belt wound around both of us without getting my pouch loose. In Paris on an escalator I was able to grab a thief by the shirt front so that he couldn’t escape with my iPhone which he dropped on the floor below us. And those are just some of the times I’ve been robbed. Then it happened again today in a brand new way.
I managed to get robbed again and in plain sight. Yesterday I was down to 100,000 pesos and so got 400,000 more ($100). I spent some so had maybe $85 in my wallet which suddenly wasn’t there.
The scam went like this. I was walking down the street crowded with shoppers and street vendors and performers when a homeless guy with a bag started bugging me. I don’t know if he was part of the scam, but immediately afterward a guy introduced himself to me in a friendly way as a fellow tourist. He said he was from Ecuador. I brushed him off. Then a guy in a suit stopped me and said that he wanted to see my passport, which he never did. He said he was from the narcotics division and was suspicious that I had just bought some cocaine. He showed me an official looking pass. I assumed he was an undercover agent looking for cocaine. I said that I had nothing to do with cocaine. He pulled me into an alley and another guy showed up in blue jeans, also with a pass that he flashed, but I didn’t read. The first guy was gone but a third man, supposedly the boss in a suit came up and said that he had to have my name. He was also asking the same of the Ecuadorian tourist I had just met who was rounded up at the same time. He then asked both me in the supposed Ecuadorian, a fellow tourist, to show him our money to see if we were carrying huge amounts of cash. The Ecuadorian did and so did I. He looked at my wallet when I opened up and commented that there was not much there and he stuffed the money back in and gave me the wallet back and I put it in an inner pocket.
But he went further, asking about dollars, but not seeming really interested, and asked to see my credit cards. I think the Ecuadorian showed his. He looked at them and asked if the red one was a debit card and then asked me for my PIN number. I took them back and said this was bullshit and I was leaving. He let me go and I walked the few yards to my Airbnb.
In all of this I tried twice to photograph their undercover passes but they wouldn’t let me and to photograph them. All of this time I thought maybe they were truly official agents and then when I realized they were con men I was glad that given them my pin or a card I was relieved that I had escaped before they could rob me.
I stopped a man on the street who spoke English and told him my story and he said that if they were police they would have had a uniform. They were con men he said. Deflated, I went up to my room and, just as I was looking for the number to key into my room, my phone went dead. I managed to charge it at the security desk in the lobby.
Once insider my airbnb I was curious how much money I had in my wallet and looked. My wallet was completely empty. Somehow in stuffing the money back in after commenting on how little I had he had palmed the money as he handed the wallet back to me. And then he went ahead, in a mild mannered way trying to get my PIN number also but didn’t get it, saw I was furious and let me go.
I was stuck. Even if I could find him (unlikely) it would have been very hard to prove that he had stolen my money. He would claim I was making it up and that the money in his pocket was his. So he very cleverly, with the help of two accomplices, and the Ecuadorian who introduced himself to me as a tourist and maybe even the bag man who was badgering me, conned me into being robbed by slight of hand. If I had given him my PIN number he would have done even better. So it was a very clever scam and taught me an entirely new way of being robbed while traveling.
One rule of mine is when traveling never to have more money in my wallet than I can afford to have stolen. All money above $100 and my American dollars and my passport I keep strapped under my belt. So it wasn’t a catastrophe, I had protected myself, and I didn’t feel violated, I felt outwitted.
My new rule is not to keep any more than $25 in my wallet and to keep my wallet in an inner pocket.
I’m certainly not going to let the loss of $85 spoil my time in Colombia.
To counter this sad story about Bogata and to illustrate the exuberance and color of life in Colombia I include a few random photos of wall art shot from a taxi window as we rode through Bogata.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 