History's Greatest Travel Scams: From Medieval Relic Fraud to the Tea House Scam in Beijing

If you’ve ever Googled “how to avoid scams in [destination],” you already know the genre: YouTube videos breathlessly (and ominously) exposing the 15 tricks that will ruin your trip to Florence, Bangkok, or Marrakech. Full disclosure: We watch them too. But the historically minded traveler will be quick to note that almost none of these scams are new. Structurally, the “hey, did you lose your wallet” scam is identical to cons recorded in Chinese travel literature over 400 years ago. The “helpful stranger” who leads you to his friend’s shop? A porter scam from 1617. Fake antiquities? Egyptian villagers were running that play on European collectors since the days of Napoleon. In this episode, we trace the world’s most common travel scams back to their historical origins across three centuries and three continents, and then embarrass ourselves by sharing the ones we’ve fallen for personally or that have happened to people on our trips we’re supposed to be protecting. Medieval Europe: Holy Bones, Unholy Business The medieval relic trade was a continent-wide fraud economy hiding in plain sight. Churches needed relics to attract pilgrims, pilgrims brought money, and money built cathedrals. The problem? There are only so many saints, and they only have so many bones. Enter the relic hunters: professional grave robbers descending into the Roman catacombs to fill orders from churches across Northern Europe, and (in the greatest heist/relic rescue of the era) two Venetian merchants who smuggled the body of St. Mark out of Alexandria (hidden under a shipment of pork). We also meet Chaucer’s Pardoner, literature’s most shameless con artist, and hear John Calvin’s withering data-driven observations about the improbable number of supposed holy relics held in churches across Europe. Ming Dynasty China: The Original Lonely Planet Warning In 1617, a Chinese writer named Zhang Yingyu published The Book of Swindles — essentially a traveler’s field guide to every way you could get cheated on the road. The bag-drop switcheroo. The porter who disappears into the crowd with your luggage. The commentary is remarkably familiar: a traveler on the road doesn’t seek ill-gotten gains, and to keep his own property safely hidden, it’s the only way to prevent loss. Four centuries later, it still is. 19th-Century Egypt: When the Scammed Deserved It After Napoleon kicked off a European craze for Egyptian antiquities, colonial collectors stripped temples and bought relics by the crate. We find it difficult to feel sorry for them when it turns out local workshops were producing fake scarabs and amulets by the thousand. The crowning achievement: an entire village near Luxor that built a convincing fake royal tomb, furnished it with forged antiquities, and conned a dealer out of 600 gold pounds. And Then There’s Us We also share some of our own less glorious moments — including the tea house and KTV bar double-hit (one student, one day, both scams), a game of bat and ball at the Temple of Heaven that turned out to have a cover charge, and a Berber market in Marrakech that supposedly only happens once every two months but whose bracelet broke in two days. The through-line? The scam works because the wanting is universal. We want to believe. We want our trip to be magical. And sometimes that plays right into the magician's hands. Have a scam story of your own? Send it in — we might feature it in a future newsletter. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bytheirowncompass.substack.com/subscribe