One thing that has become painfully apparent in these past few months has been the normalization of fraud. While I do come from a land far far away, where distrusting others is in one’s blood, even I have been shocked by the audacity of some. Trying to scam gringos and bragging about it is considered to be the national sport right after soccer. There are even special public Facebook groups where people brag about swindling those stupid, pesky foreigners out of their money. Same as there are public groups where local taxi drivers just share information about their passengers, such as their name, surname, photo and mobile phone number with various comments in the range from “This one doesn’t understand Spanish, what an idiot.” to “This cunt did not write down my phone number, don’t take her rides.” with people celebrating these posts and showering them with likes and ‘love’ reactions. Speaking of FB, even immigrant and expat groups are not safe, where there is a legitimate question, there are multiple troll answers from hateful locals expressing their inability to understand the questions, calling them stupid and throwing around variations of the classic phrase “Get out of Perú.” I have noticed that there are several topics that provoke extreme aggression. Some of them, but not all, include questions about where one could find produce from home (like proper sour cream, quark, dumplings and others), other nationality dishes, sports bars that show anything other than soccer, cosmetics and haircare products that work on A types of hair.
With such hatred being openly celebrated it is not that difficult to comprehend why there are so many active scams. While most of them can be identified from a mile away, there are others that are very well developed. We also almost fell victim to one of the better developed ones. After many years we were finally in a place where we are ready to welcome a pup into our family. After an initial check of local law and questions on social media that ended with hate comments and death threats in my inbox we expanded our search to multiple local veterinarians and clubs in order to properly prepare. A local club stood out with their excellent communication, established social media presence and availability to provide references. Everything was peachy up until the point where it came to an initial fee for services and a set visitation time. While we were ready to do the transfer we remembered that a friend had advised us to ask for a proof of identification from the receiver in case anything unexpected were to happen.
After asking for proof of identity all communication came to a halt and our messages were left on read. As this contrast of communication was becoming more and more suspicious we decided to check them out on Google. In our case, we were almost swindled by “Andina Pets Peru”. While their TikTok had over 137k subscribers and 480k likes, FB had over 3.6k likes and 12k followers, their Google presence was their downfall. Despite having an address and a phone, their reviews were what threw us off. We took a closer look at the reviews and sure enough plenty of 5* reviews were created with a single modified text template and only a few 1* reviews were of actual people who had been scammed out of their money by paying the service fee and receiving either completely different and ill puppies or even a different breed. At that point running images through Google image search to find their source was just out of sheer curiosity, but it led to multiple stock photos or photos stolen from their real owner FB accounts in Poland. I also checked out their TikTok followers and found multiple bots that have probably been purchased in order to increase their legitimacy. Funnily enough, the next day our Fraudlords blessed us with a message saying that they would provide additional proof of puppies in a video format, which turned out to be another set of stolen photos of a completely different dog breed – English Cocker Spaniels.
While we managed to evade this particular heartbreak, we have also taken quite a few losses. Luckily only small scams like when purchasing 2 tickets to Circuito Mágico Del Agua, we were asked to pay for 4 while the receipt only showed 2 tickets and we received 2 in the end. When buying groceries online with delivery and checking the option that we only want refunds and not replacements, we still got calls in order to replace our produce, to which we always reply that as long as it is also indicated in the last receipt, we are okay with replacements. That has always, without a fail, ended up with our brand name products being replaced with 3 x cheaper ones and the receipts showing that we received what we had ordered and thus also paying 3 times the price.
Sure, all of them are small nuisances, but when they happen on a daily basis, they stack up very swiftly. For me personally, the one thing that pissed me off severely was buying a 5l water bottle from our corner store just to find out at home that the safety seal had been peeled off and it had been filled with tap water. You may ask – S, how could you possibly be sure that it was tap water? Dying on the white, porcelain throne proves it, my dears.. every single time. At this point I can identify as a water purity tester strip.
Despite everything that is previously mentioned here, I try to keep a positive spirit. After a few days it even becomes funny and after a few months I can genuinely laugh about it while writing the excerpts of my diary here. Word up!
