Summer is the Peak Time for Travel Scams: Watch out for Fraud

You've just turned on your computer to access your e-mail, when suddenly you're confronted with an immediate emergency. Your grandson aged 19, or else a friend in his fifties, or your former assistant at the corporation for which you worked, is sending you an urgent, electronic plea for help. They are either in a foreign hospital, with a slightly disabling ailment, or in a foreign jail -- in Paris, let's say -- for having inadvertently violated a traffic rule. And they can't get out of either the hospital or jail without paying a bill of seven hundred and fifty dollars. Can you please wire the money?
 
So help me, I actually received such a plea for help less than two years ago. And I came close to wiring the money until I first had the sense to attempt to verify the claim. It wasn't easy. The criminal who concocted the scheme -- and that person must have sent the plea to at least fifty different persons in one day -- had obtained amazingly realistic information about the identity of my grandson, friend or acquaintance from various social media sites where that information had been posted for all to see. The popularity of Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, and the easy access to personal information appearing on those sites, has greatly expanded the opportunities to use common travel predicaments as the setting for scams.
 
I've now heard of numerous people who have received these summertime appeals for help, supposedly sent by a friend who was traveling in Europe or Southeast Asia. And I know of well-meaning sorts who have actually wired the money.
 
Travel scams are on the rise. They are skyrocketing in number and in size. They used to be confined to offers of free trips or stays that actually required attendance at heavy-handed solicitations to buy time-shares. But the people selling time-shares are pikers when compared with the crooks who are now dominating the travel scene.
 
The lesser form of scams involves the use of robo-calls. Your telephone rings, you pick up the receiver, and in quick order you first hear the sound of seagulls, then of waves breaking on the shore, then various bars of maritime-like music, and then the stentorian speech of a gravelly-voiced announcer saying: "This is your captain speaking and I'm inviting you on a cruise -- a free-of-charge cruise".
 
You ultimately pay the small amount of taxes and fees associated with that cruise -- the actual sailing is supposedly free of charge -- and find yourself confined to the deck of a ferry traveling from a port in eastern Florida to the Bahamas, a "cruise" of about two hours. You don't receive a cabin. The small amount you've paid for phony fees and taxes is actually triple the size of a ticket for deck passage that you could have bought on the very same ferry.
 
The scams currently on view in the world of travel are endlessly ingenious. Some of them tell you that you are the lucky winner of a contest -- that you will be receiving a free vacation simply for paying a registration fee. The reason so many people succumb to these phony announcements is that there actually are legitimate contests, and some people are correctly chosen as winners. But those people receive a registered letter announcing they have won -- and not a recorded phone call. The receipt of a registered letter is perhaps the only persuasive evidence that a contest is on the up-and-up.
 
Beyond that, the would-be traveler must simply bear in mind the ancient adage: There is no such thing as a free lunch. In this time of travel scams, it's more important than ever to be constantly guarded and alert.