Scamcity beware, Mr. Paranoid is coming to get you...

Speaking of small time entrepreneurs, Manila is (not surprisingly to many apparently) probably the capital city of con artists and scams are a daily risk when you are considered a walking ATM. While I was hopping from guesthouse to guesthouse and budget hotel to budget hotel looking for a clean economy room that would feel a bit safe to leave my stuff in, I came across many a reading board in the lounge areas and every time there would be a notion to be careful of this or that scam. It seemed like every place had its own warning, and I must say I did feel like getting a lot of conspicuous glares while walking with my backpack and a metal case filled with god knows what.. (I know what, but the locals don't, so as far as they know it's stuffed with dollar bills or uncut cocaine, or maybe just heaps and heaps of illegal porn discs.) Now this isn't unusual in Asia, but what is a little more unusual is that when I was just shopping later on and thus free of any attention attracting bags and all I couldn't help but notice being followed around. Now I know some of my dear friends back home think one of my flaws is that I can be uselessly paranoid at times, but around here it really saved me a couple of times already for some scary traps... Sure enough, when I stopped window shopping and decided to return where I came from, the guy who I considered to be my secret admirer (always try to keep it cheerful, no use in calling him a scary moneygrabbing thug yet) suddenly seemed to have something of interest in that same direction as well. When I stopped to check out some goodies in the windows, he did the same. Soon this was becoming something of a cartooneske chase, and I decided to get rid of him using one of the many cramped elevators in the mall. On another occasion that same day, I was walking back from having had dinner in one of the malls restaurants and as I walked past some Filipino body builder type he glanced me a smile and said "Hello Sir". I smiled back at him as I find people around here to be polite to me, but sure enough this guy wasn't just polite, he was part of a bigger game. After some cat and mouse I turned around and wanted to pass him by in opposite directions, and he tried to get a conversation again. This time I didn't smile but just did my Steven Seagal look (it's actually not difficult if you ever had a botox cure, but I relied purely on my professional acting skills of course) and passed him by radiating with a "I'm ready if you are" attitude. The good thing about being so tall and having quite wide shoulders, people actually believe I am one of Arnies cousins if I want to around here. Anyway, he followed me from what he must have considered a more discrete distance by then, probably hoping I would return to my hotel or do something else that would give him a starting point on working on me. What I did was I would just move erratically, whilst sending text messages on my phone and from time to time I would just look over my shoulder and give him a long disappointed look. After a couple of times he got the point and I finally lost him entering one of the supermarkets around. Now I had no idea which scam he was gonna use on me, it could have been any of the following ones: Stranger walks up to you, smiles and all, after some chit chat (Where you from? Oh, Belgium! Jean Claude Van Damme, he is a good actor Sir!) they will start to give you some tips and advice about where to go and what to do in Manila, and after you grow confident that they are good people, invite you for a drink in a public place or maybe offer you some candy or a snack. Truth is, they spike it with a local variation of Rohypnol, and there are numerous accounts of people waking up in a gutter or some unfamiliar hotel room (guess what, they paid for it with your money!) in some shady area of town, with no valuables left on you. Sounds like an urban legend? There are just too many people leaving messages\ behind in the guesthouse lounges not to consider this a true tale. Another popular scam is the one where you are instead invited by the friendly folks that wanted to show you their city, and if you are adventurous enough to do so, you will enjoy a rather good meal after which some kind uncle starts a friendly game of cards with the family, inviting you in. Invariable these games all end up with you losing loads of money and the friendly uncle suddenly seems to have lots of not-so-friendly cousins that accompany you to the nearest ATM. Since the police can't help here (they're not called Manila's finest around here) you always end up broke and ready to go home wit yet another story of adventure and lots of red numbers on your bank account. Now don't get me wrong, Manila isn't all like that fishy bar in Star Wars where you see all these scoundrels and thugs having futuristic beers and all, but if you are not careful you will end up getting scammed around here. The other popular scam involves a guy or girl wearing a uniform of the hotel where you stay chatting up with you about some bad luck story and trying to borrow some money. They aren't part of the hotel and that number and email they gave you is just fake. Ok, since I seem to be on a roll here let's hand out some more scams. People will follow you discretely (yeah, if you're paranoid like me no one is discrete of course) to your hotel, try to see what room you stay in by either seeing you receive your key with attached roomnumber, or by watching you from a balcony as you walk in your room if it's one of those hotels where the rooms are centered around an open air atrium. Anyway, next step is they call reception, ask them for getting connected to such and such room, and then when you answer the phone pretend to be from reception. Apparently the best way to get out of the scam is pretending you are staying with a whole lot of people in the room (say your wife and three kids, or two brothers). Otherwise they start to threaten you and try and force you to deliver a large sum of money at some undisclosed location. How they do that? I have no idea, but the hotel where I stay politely asks not to give in (splendid, I wasn't planning so) and contact them with all the information you have, so they can take action against those people. Anyways, this feels like a very farfetched one. But apparently some people get scared very easily when staying far from home and all, as it does work on some. Comfortingly to know there are also the regular scams that are going on everywhere else on this planet, like the "meter doesn't work in my taxi sir" scam (yup, even I had it happening to me when I arrived, after talking the driver into using his meter or I would get out, he relented and used it, only to press some buttons when we arrived and the magic number disappeared from the screen and some error came up, so I was politely asked for 60 instead of 40 pesos. (Which means 1 euro instead of 75 cents, so I resigned in sighing heavily while I gave him his little extra money that I would otherwise have given as tip, since the taxis here run by the distance, not by the time you spend in it
I started thinking the other day that there are probably not many ways of avoiding life's little scams unless you took some serious action. I wondered if a god fearing filipino (oh, like mexicans they are when it comes to religion) would dare ripping off a pastor if he was white, but then again I didn't feel like dressing up for the part and swating even more than usual wearing some black dress in this tropic environment... But then ust today as I was once more approached by a smiling man on his horse (they have two wheeled carriages around the tourist area and invariably they try to get you to get into them by pretending it's ust 20 pesos and by the end of the tour it turns out they meant 20 US dollars, unfortunately they always drop you off in a quite plqce where lots of fellow carriages are standing to help out if thee is trouble... for them...) Anyway, I just politely told him "I don't need no horse today Pare", trying to show off my few pinoy words, so he would know i wasn't all green behind the ears... Of course this didn't impress my smiling friend and he kept on trying to get me on the carriage. I tried ignoring him casually while changing lenses on my camera, when all of a sudden he gave me a way out... "Are you here on holiday Sir?" He asked as it is part of their little chit chats with tourists so that there is always interaction between the two parties. Now I had to concentrate not to start grinning because of the option he gave me.... I just continued attaching the lens on my big and professional looking camera and with all the cool I had on this blazing hot day said the magic words: "Nah, I work for the newspaper Pare" Now, either those words had some real magic quality to them and I just made an adult male and his horse disappear in thin air, or this guy had learned from the sorts like Batman and other ninja-like fellas that seem to appear and disappear as they please, because when I lifted up my head again after the lens was properly attached to my Nikon D200, neither horse nor smiling man were to be seen... Oh, sometimes it's ust fun to play along with the world of friendly cons... This was the moment I starte to relax into my skin and appreciate this new place I was visiting. And I'm sure more pictures like the one above will follow now that I'm adapting to this pearl of the Orient....