Sonnie's video: We Got Scammed In Thailand : Our First Day In Thailand

We got scammed on our FIRST DAY in Thailand! It ended up being ok, but it could've been SO MUCH WORSE! This happened during our first day in Bangkok, Thailand. Enjoy! SUPPORT US! (^_^): https://www.patreon.com/sonnietravels FOLLOW ME! (^_^): *On Twitter: @SonnieTravels *On Instagram: @SonnieTravels Thailand is a well known tourist destination with a lot to offer visitors, but it’s also well known for it’s scams. I did research and was familiar with some of them, but there are honestly too many to keep track of! There’s the “Sorry, the Grand Palace isn’t open today, let me take you to other places that pay me!” scam, the “These gems are actually cut pieces of glass, but we’ll tell you they’re very cheap here, but can be sold back in your home country for 5 times the price so you guy them” scam, and the “You actually handed me a real bill, but I’ll swap it out with a counterfeit one so you have to pay double!” just to name a few! We luckily didn’t fall for any of those, but here’s what did happen on our first day in Thailand… Yeah, no. It was not a special holiday. Don’t believe this ish. We turned away multiple tuk tuk drivers away until a certain price caught our ear. In his proposal, he mentioned taking us to like 5 or 6 places including a floating market and the Grand Palace, but, yeah neither of those last two places happened. After the Golden Mount (Wat Saket), we were brought to a small, local temple. It was next to an elementary school. A man inside started speaking to us about how great our driver was to bring us here because most tourists don’t know about it. He insisted on showing Joe how to pray, Thai style and then mentioned that his wife and son were getting a ton of clothes at this local tailor because there’s a big sale going on due to this government holiday. So yeah, he was definitely a plant and part of the scam. But before the Giant Buddah there was a pit stop! Our driver made seemingly casual conversation with us while driving and found out that we hadn’t booked our train ticket, nor our hostel for the next part of our trip and offered to drive us to a travel agency. Joe and I were honestly immediately suspicious and untrusting of the place. The guy was lying to us about their likely not being any accommodations available and we knew it because I pulled out my hostelworld app and showed him all the availabilities, he was trying to up sell us to a hotel with a pool (likely fake photos) and when he saw how suspicious we were he pointed to a set of huge, silver numbers on the wall stating they were officially recognized by the government. I raised my eyebrows as a way to say, “Those numbers mean nothing to us and you could’ve just put them up there yourselves”. When he realized we’d keep politely declining his offers, he literally leaned back in his chair with an annoyed huff and waved us off as if we’d completely wasted his time. But our driver then got a coupon for free gas for bringing us in and then we got to go to the Giant Buddha. And the next stop was to a tailor! Surprise, surprise! Our driver stated, once again, that we didn’t have to buy anything, but that by just going in and looking at their stuff, maybe drinking a free beer, he’d get a coupon for some free gas. And scams are something I actually really enjoy reading about. I find them fascinating and some are even funny! Like in Cairo, Egypt when people will pay before getting on a camel for a picture in front of the pyramids, but then the handler won’t give the order for the camel to kneel again until you pay even more! But holy cow are these con artists convincing! They lie to your face with a smile you feel like you can trust. So why did we enjoy this scam? Well, for one, because I had done some research into the fake travel agencies and other scams, we knew not to give our money out to places tuk tuks brought us to. If we had paid that agency thousands of baht just to find out they kept it all and booked nothing, we’d had been a lot more upset. And we didn’t consider the day a loss because we were planning on just roaming around, but instead we paid next to nothing to watch the city pass us by in a tuk tuk while being refreshed by the wind and getting to see some sites along the way! Not a bad way to spend the day!