On Getting Scammed

If you’re going to Paris this summer make sure to check your bill at the restaurant.

That means you should check the conversion the waiter runs on your card. Check the “service” charge that may appear twice. Check the prices on the menu they hand you against the prices on the menu in the window.

That’s the because the hottest new thing in Paris is scamming tourists who sit down at restaurants. Specifically, targeting American tourists. 

The scams are usually small. They bring Americans the expensive bottled water instead of the free carafe everyone else gets. They pour the large Coke and never mention the small. Sometimes they even pour the cheap wine while charging you for the expensive bottle, betting you’ll notice and say nothing. They bake service into the bill and then imply you’re supposed to tip again.

It has gotten so routine that a French media outlet recently went undercover as Americans to see how much restaurants would overcharge them.

As a tourist, you adjust expectations depending on where you go. In Brazil, you are on your guard a little bit. But most people don’t expect to be ripped off in Paris. Things are changing. As the wealth gap between Europe and America keeps increasing, you’re going to see scammy stuff all over the place. The latest thing is selling Americans fantasy real estate abroad. Like the one euro homes in Italy.

@jashiproject

Replying to @Buck2022 the one dollar houses in Italy are a scam and I’m saying this is an Italian who lives in America who comes from the ... See more

One big question is a lot of scammy behavior targeted at Americans, in particular.

@hotmess

Obviously we had to reminisce on last year's euro trip when we got scammed and our "villa" didn't exist 🫶

Why Are Americans Singled Out?

Most people assume it is because Americans have money. But plenty of tourists have money. The world is full of rich people. The real reason is much more interesting. It is international understood that Americans are uniquely easy to scam.

From abroad, Americans are seen as trusting, friendly, and too willing to believe a good story. Americans are nice. And when Americans do get ripped off, they don;’t seem to take it as personally. They say, “Well, never going back there again,” and move on. It is annoying, but not too serious.

European writers noticed this early in its history. Tocqueville saw Americans as practical but also unusually open to schemes. Dickens saw a country of salesmen, speculators, and confidence men. Baudelaire thought Americans enjoyed being fooled.

These writers definitely noticed something real. American society has always produced an unusual number of salesmen, speculators and con men. There’s even an argument from a British writer that the entire American independence project was just a business venture for speculators. That Donald Trump is not some oddity, but really represents what America was founded on.

But all these foreign writers misunderstand what they are seeing because they are on the outside. Americans don’t like being scammed. They are not fools nor are they gluttons for punishment. It’s just that when you are inside American culture, you realize there is a different relationship with being scammed than other cultures. Let me explain.

Scamming and Losers

In much of the world, being known as someone who gets scammed is a serious insult. Much more serious than in America.

The French call the victim of a scam a pigeon. Russians call him a lokh. Israelis call him a frayer. Italians have the pollo da spennare, the chicken waiting to be plucked. In Japan he is kamo, the duck, in Hindi, the bakra, the goat. Koreans call him a hogu, a pushover who exists to be exploited. In Arabic, he is a mughaffal, a gullible fool. Germans call him a Trottel. These are words for an idiot with poor judgment. He resembles a dumb animal. Livestock. Waiting to get plucked.

Why do so many old cultures scorn the person who gets cheated in a transaction?

Because in much of the world, life has always been openly unfair. The state is corrupt. Good jobs go to insiders. Rules are unevenly enforced. The economy is not really open. You can be smart and still end up poor. You can work hard and still lose.

When resources are scarce, like they have been for most of history, life becomes zero-sum. This means there is one place where you are expected to defend yourself, the transaction directly in front of you. The little arena of combat. You may not be able to defeat the system, but you are expected not to be fooled by someone selling you something.

There is great pride in in not being scammed. For example, Turks will tell you they never take certain taxis, because those taxis exist to fleece outsiders.

America reverses this completely. To the American mind, a bad transaction is a small detail. But a bad life is the catastrophe.

The scammer is just a dishonest person. Ideally, the shame should be with him, not on the victim for not recognizing it. Getting fooled means you were trusting. Fine. You’re good a person. You learn the lesson and move on. Focus on the totality of your circumstances.

This attitude only makes sense if you believe something deeper. That life is broadly fair. Not perfectly fair. But fair enough that talent, effort, and persistence can still produce a good life.

That means the little day-to-day scam is not seen as very serious. It just becomes a setback, but not anything character related. This is why Americans can often shrug off being taken advantage of in a way that shocks people elsewhere. The transaction is too small to define them.

Therefore, the ultimate American horror is not the sucker.

It is the loser.

This is one of the most revealing words in the American vocabulary. A loser is a permanent state of defeat. A sucker can recover. A loser cannot. And so Americans worry less about being fooled in a single transaction than about falling behind in life itself. The real shame is after all the opportunities America supposedly offers, you still didn't make it.

You can see how this same micro-transaction to over life comparison plays out within groups in America itself.

One notable exception inside America itself are Black Americans. They have historically used the word sucker far more than other groups. There is a sensitivity in that culture being taken for a fool in small transactions. Well, Black Americans as a group, have historically thought the system was not fair to them. That a life outcome isn’t connected to effort. Once that mindset happens, the transaction in front of you becomes much more important than the overall life outcome you feel you cannot control.

Scamming Powers the Economy

It is not talked about enough that America’s tolerance for being scammed is one of the hidden engines of American economic power.

At the individual level, this is a weakness. One man hears a pitch, suspends disbelief, and loses all his money. But scale changes the meaning of the behavior. A million people willing to hear the pitch becomes a market. Ten million people willing to try the unproven thing becomes an industry. And then a national economy is transformed.

The opposite happens too. A society full of people terrified of looking foolish becomes defensive before every transaction. This protects people from fraud, but it also seals them off from opportunity. You can feel this in older, more cynical cultures, the protective instinct to say no before the pitch has even finished.

The problem is that the fraudster and the entrepreneur approach you in exactly the same way. Both ask you to test something before you know it works. And every new thing arrives in the world as a risk. The first automobile. The first internet companies. Most new technologies, and ideas begin looking like scams. But for Americans, they’ll try it out.

Melville is the great novelist of America. Most people remember Moby-Dick and it really is the greatest American novel. But his last work, The Confidence-Man, was about a country where trust and fraud are almost impossible to separate. The same society producing extraordinary growth was also producing extraordinary swindles. This was written in the 1850s and is still an American trait today.

The dark side of all of this, of course, is you’re just constantly fed endless scams. Which gets tiring after awhile.

How to Avoid Becoming Scammed

The psychology of scams is interesting because it is such an old problem. People have been lying, and cheating each other for thousands of years, which means we have accumulated a surprising amount of wisdom about how deception works and how to avoid it.

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