Well this is an award that you definitely do not want if 20% of your GDP depends on tourism, which is the case in Thailand.
After years of living here I have learned how to avoid scams but it really is remarkable how many of them there are around every corner in places like Bangkok, Phuket, Pattaya, and even my home city of Chiang Mai.
Things get worse for travelers if they are coming here during peak season, which takes place from mid-December to mid-February.
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The most common scam in Thailand involves transport and nowhere is this more true than in tuk-tuks. Everyone wants to have a go at riding in this iconic vehicle, and I will admit when i was new here, so did I. There is no reason to feel bad about this. However, you will notice that anyone that has been here for any period of time NEVER takes this transportation and there is a reason for this. Most of the time, there is some sort of shady scam going on. I never seek out this sort of transport but when a friend was visiting they wanted to do it. I can speak Thai reasonably well and unlike a lot of tourists, I attempted to negotiate a price before we got in. The driver seemed annoyed that I was speaking Thai and I can only assume that this is because he now knows that there is less chance of pulling off a scam. He still conned us a little bit though because even though where we were going was just a few km's away, he was steadfast in his 100 Baht price for the journey. To put this in perspective this journey, in an air conditioned car acquired from Grab (same this as Uber) this journey would be less than half that much.
According to Mastercard, nearly 50% of all fraud in Bangkok comes from issues with taxis or transport of some sort and this really turns people off and puts them in a bad mood when they realize they have been "taken for a ride" by the driver. I know plenty of people that were offered very low priced transportation that suddenly found themselves being harassed into going into a tailor or gem store, which are themselves also a scam.
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now that I have lived here for a while I always chuckle a little bit when I am in a taxi and we go by a custom suit shop and there is a tuk tuk or "meter taxi" parked out front. I know immediately that there are some tourist in there that are completely confused and probably upset about what is going.
There are a ton of scams in Thailand and i would highly advise that anyone that is visiting here read a list of the common one before coming to Thailand. This blog does a pretty good job of identifying most of them and I have been subjected to almost all of these at one point or another.
This designation by Mastercard is a very bad thing for Thailand tourism because as I have noticed with my own eyes both in person and what I read online, Thailand is starting to see some backlash from the overall tourism industry as many people are now opting to go to Malaysia, Vietnam, and even Cambodia instead of coming here. I'm not saying there are no scams in those places as well because there probably is, but at the moment Thailand is becoming quite renowned for it.
Mastercard designated these places as the places with the highest levels of reported scams of any tourist destination in the world..
- Cancun, Mexico (understandable)
- Hanoi, Vietnam
- Dhaka, Bangladesh
- Jakarta, Indonesia
For me, I tend to be on my guard when I travel and get at least some level of information about the area before I arrive. When I see people getting scammed over here in Thailand often I will shake my head in disbelief because it seems so obvious to me. But then again I try to remember how it was when I arrived here for the very first time and I too was "ripe for the picking" as far as scams were concerned.
Will Thailand see any noticeable drop in tourism? Well, I think they already are to be honest as many of the tourism places here in Chiang Mai seem rather deserted compared to years past. As the saying goes, you reap what you sow, and while I feel bad for the legitimate workers out there, this is a problem that can only be fixed by the people that work in it. If they keep going for a quick buck with scams, the internet world is going to expose them and people are going to choose to go elsewhere. I fear that Thailand will only do something to remedy this once it is too late for those actions to have any real impact.