Traveling long distances for the holidays is certainly a long-awaited moment. Especially if the holiday destination is a foreign country that has never been visited before.
Even though you can imagine fun things, you also need to prepare for other anticipations. One of them is the anticipation of fraud when traveling to foreign countries. To prevent this, you can do some important tips.
Tips for Avoiding Scams and Fraud While Traveling
Even if you are excited because you are visiting a place you have never been to, get to know new people, or are excited because of interesting street attractions that you accidentally found at your vacation spot. You must not let your guard down because you are too excited.
Crime is always lurking everywhere, travelers are no exception. To avoid scams and fraud while traveling, let’s look at the following tips!
1. Always Be Aware in The Crowd
This one tip actually applies whenever you leave the house, not just during the holidays. But for those of you who are on vacation out of town or abroad, this is very important for you to pay attention to, because you are far from home.
In crowded places, it is easy to pickpockets. Be careful if suddenly someone is crowding around you. This is often done on purpose to distract you.
To avoid this, you should pay attention to your luggage and position it in front of your body when passing through places that are crowded with visitors. Just bring enough money in the bag. But if you have to carry all the money with you, separate it in several different places so that when the money in one place is stolen, you will still have other cash reserves.
2. Make Sure of The Price When You Buy Something
Another scam that is usually experienced by travelers is fraud when shopping for souvenirs that are typical of where you are on vacation. It is at this time that traders usually use it to deceive tourists. Usually they give a price that is many times more expensive than the market price to get many times the profit too.
Therefore, diligently check various sources before buying something. For example, you can ask the hotel staff where you are staying at what the market price of the item you want is. Or you can also search for information on the internet.
3. Don’t Trust People You Don’t Know Too Easily
Where you are on vacation, surely you will meet many foreigners who live in the area every day. This is often used by that person to gain profit by deceiving you.
Usually the scammer will approach you and start to pretend to be friendly by inviting you to talk. That person will ask you various things, like where are you from or what place are you going.
Then, he will offer to help take you to that place without asking for anything in return. However, when they arrive at their destination, that person will ask for fees with a little force.
Usually people with malicious intent like this already know very well which tourists are going there for the first time and which tourists are used to coming to that place. They can see from the gesture you make.
Therefore, you should act as normal as possible. Try to mingle with the people around you. Because, if you really show that you are a tourist, you will easily become the target of scams like this.
4. First Check Transportation Costs Before Traveling
Before going somewhere, especially places that you have never visited, you should make it a habit to first check the prices of all possible means of transportation, or even that you will definitely use later.
You can check from several websites that sell plane, train, or bus tickets that you will use. So, upon arrival at your destination, you won’t be fooled by local transportation ticket sellers and have to pay a much more expensive fee.
5. Don’t Give Credit Card Numbers to Random People
Fraud like this is prone to occur in the hotels where you stay. When you are in a hotel room, suddenly someone calls and claims to be the hotel receptionist. This person will bill you for hotel expenses during your stay and ask you to pay using a credit card and ask to state your credit card number.
If people like this contact you, don’t immediately believe them and mention your credit card number. Go down to the ground floor where the receptionist is. Confirm first, is it true that they contacted you.
In general, the receptionist will not ask for your credit card information over the phone. You have to be more careful about phone calls like this so that your credit card doesn’t get caught.
Conclusion
Fraud can happen to anyone, anywhere, and anytime. Even more so when you become a tourist in a foreign place and can become an easy target to become a victim of fraud.
What you need to do is always be vigilant, be sensitive to the environment, and not easily trust other people. This will help you to avoid all kinds of scams and fraud.