Travel Tales: Cons, Scams & Ripoffs is a collection of tales of schemes perpetrated against travelers. If you’re conned or scammed in your travels we hope you escape them with only minor inconveniences. This book collects a variety of schemes that happen to travelers, but mostly these won’t happen to you. You’ll read examples of often elaborately orchestrated schemes that unscrupulous actors create and carry out on you if you’re unwary. This book includes common schemes designed to separate you from your money. Although scammed victims will often credit con artists with undo creativity, most often victims would just as soon not be victims to begin with. Indeed, the stories in this book run the gamut of clever ruses played out on unwary travelers. Even the manufacturers of alluring beautiful carpets for sale in the Middle East see you coming! How easy they fool you. Travelers pay ridiculous prices for items they could’ve paid far less. Is bargaining so distasteful, or have they not bargained nearly long enough? Scams have been around since time immemorial. Other cons lure unsuspecting victims into bars. And gambling cons are run on tourists looking for quick and easy wins, too trusting players, and unwitting losers.There are countless stories of ripoffs involving taxis, camels, rickshaws, boats, and what have you, whereby travelers would’ve been much better off had they negotiated fares in advance. Negotiate, negotiate, negotiate we’re told before getting in cabs. You’d be surprised how many travelers still fail to do this! People love to be fooled by clever magicians. Americans are often easily conned into taking for granted so-called self-styled ‘experts, ’ who fool you into believing they really know what they’re doing when clearly they do not. It’s no surprise that some river guide ‘experts’ have fallen victim, themselves, to crocodile and hippo attacks while guiding travelers on jungle rivers. This book is the place to read abou the perpetrators and the victims of cons and scams to get a good idea of what some are and how to avoid them. You’ll gain a healthy respect for what it is to be the victim of one of the seemingly endless variety of schemes designed to lure the unwary traveler. And with a better knowledge of dangers of falling victim to these cons and scams through reading the accounts of others, hopefully, you’ll gain a better sense of safety, security, enjoyment, and appreciation of your travels. This book includes many examples of bad things that can happen to the unwary traveler. But bad things DO happen, and the best thing is to avoid them in altogether. We should try our best to escape them. While there’s no easy miracle fix for dealing with the seemingly endless variety of cons and scams, there are, nevertheless, meaningful takeaway strategies in this book that should better enable you to make you more aware of the schemes in travel to help you reduce the risks of succumbing to them. While many of the cons and scams are not particularly dangerous, many are about difficult, embarrassing, and otherwise annoying nuisances that we’d all do very well to avoid. Some of the cons, scams, and ripoffs may surprise you, and some would never likely even occur to you. Indeed, such misadventures may never happen to you, but reading about them should at least give you some pause. Who knows, maybe you’ll never suffer the indignity and inconvenience of a con game or scam after all. Sure, you’ll read the stories that’ll alert you to situations you’ve never heard of, but if you avoid even one con or scam through reading this book, then I’ll have accomplished a very useful purpose.