One thing to do is to remember that it’s not usually the case that street beggars are middle class grifters in disguise.
Scammer: “I lost my wallet, I need gas money.”
Me: “Aw man, that sucks. Welp, good luck!”
Would that be this guy? Haven’t read of any sightings of him on Reddit or Universal Hub for a few years now, maybe he’s moved on to somewhere he’s not so infamous.
The Czech Republic is an EU country. I’m pretty sure that license databases all over the EU are connected. Shouldn’t be harder to find even if it is registered in Germany or Italy.
Sadly, the UK is not an EU member any longer. Severing of all cooperation was part of The Glorious Recovery of Sovereignty.
In general, any time a stranger asks you for (A) so that they can do (B) with it, offer to do (B) for them yourself. Not just for the potential hilarity of exposing them as a scammer and watching them squirm, but also because acquiescing by doing (A) like they asked can be dangerous.
Example: I have a friend who was out in her front yard one night. A young woman came running up to her from the street, panic-stricken. This stranger said that her crazy ex-boyfriend was after her and she thought her life was in danger, and asked to come inside my friend’s house and use my friend’s landline phone to call the police. (I think this was before mobile phones became ubiquitous.) My friend sensed something was up, and offered to go inside and call the police herself, and told the stranger to wait outside. The stranger suddenly didn’t want that, said never mind, and walked off.
I’ll let your imagination fill in what would’ve happened had my friend let the stranger inside her house.
I’ll tell you the best completely unscientific charm that anecdotally kept people from asking me for money for a few years:
I was repairing a dog ear hematoma one day (which is a very bloody surgery), and one of the techs, who is also a close friend, was doing a snack run. I’m gloved up, with totally bloody hands, and an anesthetized patient, so can’t retrieve my wallet. She gets the ex army dudetech to get it out of my pocket removes a 5, and heads off to get snacks. When she got back, I was finishing up surgery (but had not yet cleaned up, so was still gloved up), and she insisted on giving my money back (about $1 and change). Insisting on handing it to me (rather than putting it on the counter), I get that she’s giving me a hard time (since I can’t touch anything until the last stitch is in), but she won’t give up. Finally, she nicely places my change in a pool of blood on the wet table.
The coins rinsed off nicely, but the $1 bill… Knowing that I’m eventually going to have the opportunity to give the bill back to her, I put it on a paper towel to dry. One side is absolutely clean, and the other, almost completely covered in dog blood.
Once dried I had it in my wallet waiting for the opportunity to give it back to her. She and her GF moved out of state within the year, so the bloody bill stayed in my wallet in a separate area. I walked through downtown LA and SF in the intervening years, and nobody asked me for money once.
Finally someone in Torrance asked me for $ “to buy a sandwich”, and I excitedly pulled out the bill, folded of course to the clean side, handed it to him, and started to walk away. He opened the bill, kinda let out a quiet “hey…”, then decided better not to ask.
So… Make blood bills if you don’t want to be asked for money! Totally unscientific, and you have “evidence” in an anecdotal sample size of 1!
I generally find making a connection by jokingly suggest they spend the money on alcohol or smokes… this interaction, I feel, gives people back a bit of dignity. They tend to remember you and not hit you up again.
FFS if you’re on the street asking for money then I would prefer ‘my’ money to help someone feel comfortable and ‘welfare’ can do their job in helping their situation.
I don’t know what the petrol prices are like in Poland, but in the UK you could easily put £100 of fuel into a BMW like that.
Most of the beggars near me just straight up ask for money for food or shelter rather than trying to con anyone. I often see people buy them food so they know the money won’t be going on drugs.
The main car in question has a UK plate.
UK has left the EU with many consequences for data sharing.
In any event, I believed foreign police had to request access to the data / details of the car rather than being given direct access to (in this case) the UK DVLA database. (But I may be wrong.)
A scam as organised as having business cards and fake gold rings is not going to use genuine number plates, a cloned plate from a similar vehicle is easy enough to make.
Why did a hungry person deserve to be given a bill that was covered in blood? Maybe I’m being obtuse, but that seems kind of cruel. They didn’t have anything to do with what the woman who got it bloody in the first place did. They were literally just hungry.
If they’re asking for money for food I tend to offer them food. It starts with a “what would you like?” at which point they normally seem a bit perplexed then tentatively say “a cup of coffee” or a “baked potato” or whatever. Who knows whether they planned to spend it on drugs, but they did at least get some semi decent food out of it.
Pre-COVID, I had a guy at a local gas station, at the pump next to mine, stop me and ask me if I could buy him some gas. Not money, but gas. I said, “Of course, how much do you need?” and he said "Just a couple gallons, I need to get to ".
I went inside and told the counter person to fill it on his pump, and told him, “Go ahead and fill it.” At that point he was speechless for a minute, and then went back to his car, fished out some multi-tools and came over to where I was filling up and offered to trade for the gas. I told him to hang onto those in case he ran low on gas again. He seemed pretty overcome that someone would just say “of course you need this, let me make sure you have it.”
Was he a scammer? Unsure. But if he was and just had a bunch of crap multitools that he was selling this way, I think he would have hit me up to buy one to start. Or maybe he just read me pretty well? In either case, his tank was just about empty; I think if he was really just scamming folks he’d have had more gas in the car than that.
It seems more likely to me that he was just a guy facing a hard time, given that… what, there are still millions of people unemployed or underemployed in American right now… but plenty of people here would still rather see a scam that the actual deep well of need that exists right now. If we can’t even identify the actual problems that exist, we sure as hell can’t move towards any solution to that problem.
Yep, the one and only. A few years ago he lived in my neighborhood so I saw him much more often… but I last saw him hassling someone in Roxbury this past winter (he makes a scene and gets really aggressive when people call him out). He’s been doing this for decades at this point, so I’d be surprised if he went anywhere!
That’s how it felt to me. There are enough folks around where I live who are struggling that I’m okay with not turning it into the Spanish Inquisition as to their motivations if they say, “Can you help me with this?” and they say yes to an offer to do the thing and not give them money.
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