20 Sneaky Travel Scams That Robbed Tourists A Century Ago

There was no public park in Niagara Falls before 1885, only private hackmen, carriage drivers who waited for tourists at the train station and offered tours “for almost nothing.” But once they drove tourists out to the gorge and dropped them off, they wouldn’t drive away until the tourist coughed up $10 to $20. Outrage over the scam helped prompt New York to open the country’s first state park there.

From the 1870s to the 1950s, a woman and her male partner scammed wealthy men who were traveling on their own in hotel bars and resort towns across North America and Europe. The woman would lure a man to a private room, and then the accomplice would burst in as her irate husband, threatening to beat up or humiliate the man unless he paid on the spot. They usually demanded between $1,000 and $5,000. Most men paid up and left, fearing ruin far from home. Hotels eventually employed house detectives partly to prevent this practice.

In the early 1900s, in resort towns like Saratoga Springs and Palm Beach, the grifters would tell a mark that they knew of a crooked telegrapher who would sell him advance results of horse races. They’d bring him to what looked like a busy betting parlor, complete with actors pretending to be gamblers and tellers, and get him to win some small bets. Then they’d convince him to bet up to $50,000 at the time on a “sure thing” that they knew he was supposed to lose. In other words, the telegraph line wasn’t really tapped.

When tourism took off in Egypt during the 19th century, ships traveling up the Nile toward Cairo, Luxor, and Giza would be mobbed by merchants who sold newly excavated scarabs and statues. Workshops carved these items out of soft limestone or plaster, and soaked them in a bath of acid and oil before burying them in manure until they looked old. British Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie noted that more than 90% of the scarabs sold on the streets of Cairo were recent imitations. Eventually, Egypt’s antiquities service set up its own shop with officially approved artifacts.

Between the mid-19th and early-20th centuries, tourists looking for nightlife in cities like New York, Chicago, and New Orleans were often directed to panel houses, a type of secret lodging house and brothel with a twist. The twist was a hidden wall panel that allowed a thief to enter the room while the guest slept, rob them of their valuables, and then leave again, all without waking them. The guest would only realize they’d been robbed when they woke up hours later, too late to report it.

At roadside taverns in 19th- and early-20th-century Britain and North America, a common confidence trick involved two men working together. One man posed as a poor traveler who claimed he had no cash, leaving an old violin as collateral while he went to fetch money. A second, posing as a wealthy collector, called the violin a rare Stradivarius and offered to buy it, then vanished. Hoping for that sale, the innkeeper bought the violin from the first man at a steep price, and both men were gone for good.

When trains started carrying tourists to Venice in the 1850s, they were met by gondoliers waiting at the train station. These were supposed to charge a fixed price for the trip to the hotel that the passenger had specified. The prices were displayed on rate cards in the train station. However, once the baggage was loaded and the boat reached the middle of the Grand Canal, the gondoliers would start charging the passengers two or three times the price they should have been charged.

The storefronts of commercial centers such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia in the 19th century would advertise mock auctions of liquidated watches, silver, and jewelry at deep discounts. The prices were artificially inflated by planted “Peter Funks,” a term from criminal slang referring to a stock character who masquerades as a genuine bidder. This was all staged to entice tourists and make them believe they were winning the bidding wars. They paid $20 to $50 for worthless pewter items and hollow brass watches worth a few cents each.

Under Prohibition, the cab drivers of places such as New York, Chicago, and Atlantic City got kickbacks from clip joints, which were illegal speakeasies constructed specifically to lure customers in from out of town. Inside these establishments, the patron was given cheap near-beer or even colored water and then billed for hundreds of dollars in fabricated cover charges and hostess fees. Burly bouncers guarded the exits until he either forked over his money or signed over a blank check. The purchase of illicit liquor was already a criminal act, so no police officer could be called to help the hapless customer.

American and British rich folks on the 19th-century Grand Tour would hire local guides, known as cicerones, to show them around Paris, Venice, Florence, Rome, etc. Most of their income came from secret deals with merchants. The guides would falsely claim a museum or cathedral was “closed” and steer tourists toward certain shops, where they’d be charged higher prices and the guide would get a cut. Mark Twain took aim at the practice in The Innocents Abroad.

Around the middle of the 19th century and onward to just before World War II, on the streets of Paris, London, and New York City near famous monuments, a con artist would walk ahead of a sightseer, bend down, and pick up a glinting ring. He’d explain that he was an impoverished resident of the area who didn’t care for expensive jewelry anyway. Then he’d point to a fake “18K” stamp on the inside and offer to sell it to the sightseer for a couple of bucks. The victim handed over the money and walked away with a useless lump of polished brass.

As excavations in Rome and Pompeii continued from the mid-19th into the early 20th centuries, tourists wanted souvenirs to bring back from their trip. People selling antiques outside the excavated areas claimed to be workmen who had found the coins or figurines themselves. In fact, Italian manufacturers made them, dipping newly minted copper coins in nitric acid to create a corroded surface or coating clay figures in salt to simulate age. Several of these items also found their way into museums.

During the 19th and early-20th centuries, Florence was a must-see destination for the Grand Tour traveler in search of Italian sculpture. But most tourists could not tell one type of stone from another, and local merchants took advantage. They sold statues of soft, cheap alabaster, a gypsum mineral. They chemically treated and polished it so it masqueraded as hand-carved Carrara marble with the hard shine of real marble. When the traveler returned home months later, the alabaster absorbed moisture and turned yellow and dull. Critic John Ruskin wrote essays instructing travelers how to test the hardness of a stone before purchasing it.

When the interwar cruising boom of the 1920s and 1930s began, affluent tourists disembarking in Mediterranean or Asian ports were being sold “rare natural pearls” at what were claimed to be liquidation prices after the collapse of estate jewelers. European factories had only recently succeeded in manufacturing convincing imitation pearls and glass gems coated in special lacquers. Tourists might spend thousands of dollars on their fake “pearls” and not realize they’d been swindled until they returned home and had them appraised.

In the decades between the 1850s and the mid-20th century, two-man teams of swindlers would frequent busy train stations and steamship piers, preying on rural tourists unfamiliar with city life. One man would strike up a conversation, and the other would hurry over, claiming to have just found an envelope of money and wanting to share it. They would explain that the money needed to be given to a lawyer as “good faith” first. The tourist would hand over hundreds of dollars, and the two men would walk away, leaving behind the promised envelope, containing nothing but blank pages.

Prior to computerized ticketing, 19th-century and early-20th century train tickets were complex paper documents with specific rules governing their use for transfers. Brokers often congregated in front of large railway terminals in North America and Europe, selling reduced-price “return tickets” to travelers from distant towns. These tickets were often fraudulent, having been either expired, stolen, or double-punched. The problem was not discovered until the customer tried to travel home, when the conductor refused to let him board and either forced him to buy another ticket at full price or threw him off the train.

With the growth of international rail travel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, travelers crossing the borders of Europe or North America had to change cash at booths in railway stations. At many such booths, dishonest cashiers would “change raise,” counting out coins as quickly as possible, calling out changing and misleading exchange rates, dropping coins on the floor behind the counter, or slipping in worthless obsolete banknotes. Through sleight of hand, they stole 20 to 50% of the value of a traveler’s money. In response, guidebook publishers Karl Baedeker and Thomas Cook published standard currency tables.

Between the 1850s and the 1920s, anyone entering North America or Europe by sea or train was immediately besieged by “runners,” people wearing uniform jackets with brass buttons that resembled the livery of hotel bellboys. They would grab your bags and tell you the hotel you wanted had burned down or been closed for renovation. Then they’d direct you into a waiting private coach, which took you to a privately operated boarding house with no license, where rooms were sold to you at greatly inflated prices.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, rich passengers on ocean liners arrived with huge wooden trunks that contained their entire wardrobe and all valuables. When they got off at the major harbors, fake porters, dressed in brass-buttoned jackets like real hotel employees, would collect their brass luggage tickets from them. As soon as the tourist was out of sight, the porter took the trunk straight through an alley to a waiting wagon.

During the 1910s to the 1930s, in America’s resort towns, big-con teams utilized the cackle-bladder as a last resort after having already defrauded a wealthy mark of tens of thousands of dollars. An actor would pull out a gun loaded with blanks and fire it at his partner, who would have placed a bladder of chicken or pig blood underneath his shirt. The panicked tourist, believing he had just witnessed a murder, would take the next train out of town without contacting the authorities.

This content was created with the help of AI.