My first real scam attempt in South East Asia! So exciting. Here is how it went down:

I was sitting in a park drinking a mango smoothie purchased from a woman selling them out of the back of a pickup truck. A man comes and sits next to me and starts making conversation. He soon tells me he is from Malaysia and asks where I am from in the states. I tell him Wisconsin, and he starts talking about his niece who is going to Wisconsin to work at a childrens hosptial there. I ask him if it is the Madison Children’s Hosptial, and he promptly says “Yes! Madison. I couldn’t remember the name before.” - Later, I realized that he was just using and repeating what I was saying in order to establish a connection.

His back story was that he is in town visitng his brother and mother. He wants me to meet his niece, just to tell her about Madison and exchange information. The niece is out shopping with her cousins, but he wants to take me to his brother’s place where I can wait for 30 minutes untill they get back. Everything so far seems pretty kosher. The man is nice enough and seems legitmate…

So, we hop in a taxi and take a 10 minute ride to his brother’s house. I walk in, they offer me drinks, and we all start chatting. Nothing too serious at first, talking about Obama, F1, and traveling. He asks what I do for a living, chat about that for a bit, and then I ask what he does…and here is where the scamming starts.

He tells me that he is a casino manager. He asks me if I enjoy gambling, what games I play, have I been to Las Vegas, etc. Then he tells me that he is being reassigned and moving back to Malaysia next month. Next thing I know, he is trying to convince me to come and stay at his Casino in Malaysia. He says he can get me free rooms, free drinks, $100 a day in free slots, etc. At this point I was getting pretty skeptical. I told him that I was planning on going to Malaysia and I didn’t really know when, but I could email him when I got there. He then started talking about which games to play, which ones were the best for the casino, which were the best for the player.

Then he dropped the real bomb. He casually mentioned how Casinos, while so closely watched in Vegas, were not well regulated in Malaysia. He then says he could probably use his “influence” to give me an advantage over the house in a few of the card games. When he said this, I knew for sure it was a scam. I quickly looked at my watch and asked where his daughter was (it had been over half an hour). He said she must be running late. I then told him that I really didn’t like casinos and wasn’t interested in gambling on my trip. How quickly the tables turned! He thanked me for coming and apologized for his daughters abscence. He said he didn’t want to keep me any longer and 30 seconds later, I was out on the front porch with a door in my face!

Other than being stranded in a part of town where no one seemed to speak english, I came away no worse than before. I finally tracked down a cab and made it to the train station just in time to catch the next train north.