Scams

[Vahene]

So, went out to dinner with the folks last night. I was all happy because my mom finally got my wireless card figured out, and I had popped into Das for a bit with Vellin.. to make sure everything worked fine. Internet worked, I was set.. I was on cloud nine, so we go to the Olive Garden, a nice italian restaurant where we live. We're sitting at the bar, and the bartender was fantastic, friendly, and such.

Well, there's a girl eating at the bar, to the right of my mom, and she had an appetizer, a meal, and a few drinks from the bar (mixed drinks).. we're probably talking, with her tab and meal, about 30-40 bucks, US dollars, with the drinks. So, she leaves her purse there, and says she has to do something, she'll be right back.. and takes her -to go- box with her meal in it and leaves.

She never comes back.

We get seated almost 20 minutes later, purse is still there. We get through our own appetizers.. salad.. meal.. and an hour later, the purse is still there.

She scammed them.

The bartender thought from about 10 minutes after she did it that she had scammed them. He joked, it hadn't happened in at least "Two days" he said. Said it had happened, same type of deal, at least two or three other times, and the people would say that they would go out for a smoke or they'd go to the restroom, and never come back.

New scam apparently.

I don't know how the girl had the guts to do this with a to-go box in her hand. The place was so busy though, that no one would have noticed her leaving, and the hosts and hotesses wouldn't have known she didn't pay since she was at the bar eating.

Perfect scam. The girl was about 18-20 years old it looked like, and its unfortunate people feel the need to do this, because it only makes the price of meals go up for the rest of us.

-K

[Evelond Formos]

I'm glad I don't pay for my own meals yet.

[Jehannum]

Dash and Dine is as old as the hills, though the purse left on the bar is an interesting addition to the old hat.

Here's a scam that got pulled on Tin and I while in Jamaica.

We flew to Jamaica for a nice get-away. We were booked in a pretty lavish resort hotel. I should have known it was trouble when I saw guards with machine guns at the gate.....

So anyway..I aint sceert! So a day or two later we decide to go out into the city and grab a bite to eat at one of the local restaurants. Should be no problem!!

So we walk outside, through the dozen or so people trying to push weed into my pocket, while at the same time nearly ripping tins hair out because they want to braid it...Well we get through that after we basically had to flee from the crowd. Have you ever thrown some food to seagulls on a pier? That's what it was like to walk out there...

We press on anyway. So i stop this young man. Hes clean-cut and looks "normal" so I ask him to lead us to a place where the locals like to go and eat. He says no problem and we follow him. We are winding our way through markets and side streets, going this-way and that-way until we finally stop in a place where...well lets just say....There aren't any tourists around anymore.

So then two of his buddies just HAPPEN to show up and walk along with us. They are exceptionally large people with knife-scars all over their arms...you know...Thug types. He takes us to this little tin shack there this old man is shoveling out some gruel that we were scared to eat. I still have no idea what it was. We paid for it anyway, of course and politely wrapped up that meal.

Ok so we tell the guy we're ready to go back and now he says it'll be 100 bucks to get us back to the hotel. Tin is raving pissed off at the guy and I am thinking...she's going to get us killed out here in no-mans land. Luckily I had my cash hidden and NOT in my wallet and I open my wallet and show the guy that all I have is 10 bucks. He snorts and leaves us there. We were lucky I guess. It could have been a lot worse. We finally wound our way back to hotel...

The moral of the story is..If you trust everyone to be good and decent you will probably wind up being fed nasty ass gruel and left in a spot where you don't want to be. ;p It was a good lesson though.

In the words of Ani Difranco "For every hand extended, another lies in wait...Keep your eye on that one..anticipate."

[DM Chicken Little]

Was burned this past weekend with a nice little scam...actually, just a blunt thief.

To celebrate the end of a working season, a group of us headed out to...lets call it an adult entertainment bar...after about 7 hours in the fine place we parted ways. We all bought about two rounds each, at 50 to 60 bucks a pop....no more than 150 with tips.

What should have tipped us off that this may not be the best place to hand over our card is that they required you to not only hand over your drivers license with your card for any purchase, but they also require you to run a tab no matter if you wanted one or 100 drinks. The end result, everyone in the group now have charges from 200 to 500 dollars off their credit cards.

That will teach me to run a tab in a place where im not sure what laws were being broken.