How To Avoid Travel Scams
All that glitters is not gold… or even real.
The internet has a been a boon for progress in so many ways. We have the entirety of human knowledge at our fingertips. Whatever there is to know, we can find with a few clicks on a pocket computer. Long gone are the brick and mortar travel agencies with sun-bleached posters on the walls of tropical destinations. Thanks to the internet, we no longer have to leave our homes to book a vacation from start to finish, get food, buy a car, or even find love. When I started traveling, the internet didn’t exist, and maps were on paper! You would think that with so much access to everything now, there would be fewer victims of travel scams and travel-related crime. You thought wrong.
Many scampreneurs have become adept at faking websites and making shit look like Shinola.
Travel scams are so pervasive on the world wide web, every state government and the Federal Government of the United States have websites dedicated to alerting unsuspecting travelers of the myriad ways they can be parted with their money. There are dozens of private and nonprofit sites like Scam Detector, Better Business Bureau, and Trust Pilot that travelers can use to search for reviews before they spend any money. Even a cursory Google search for “XX Company scam” will often yield results. If the company you search passes the initial smell…
