The one where scammers ruined my lovely holiday

I’m back after a week in Majorca (or Mallorca if you use the Spanish spelling) with my husband and daughter. This year has been a difficult one so far and I was very much ready for a week of relaxation. The timing was perfect around the submission of my second Northumberland-based book (no title just yet) and I was looking forward to being able to completely switch off from writing as well as taking a total social media break.

We arrived at our resort – Cala d’Or on the south east coast of the island – on Monday afternoon with a plan to do very little during our week there except unwind. We managed that for the first few days but, on the Friday, we ventured outside the resort. We traveled a little further up the coast to a beautiful fishing village called Porto Cristo where we planned a visit to the Cuevas del Drach (Dragon Caves) on the outskirts of the village.

Our taxi dropped us off by a really pretty church – Església de la Mare de Déu del Carme de Portocristo – positioned in a square surrounded by houses and cafés and with a small car park. It was just a short walk to the main beach down one street so an ideal position to have been dropped off.

Porto Cristo was beautiful but what happened to me there wasn’t. Several days later, I feel ashamed, embarrassed and very stupid about this but I wanted to share it on my blog as a ‘be really, really careful’ lesson to my readers because I always believed I was sensible and would never fall for any scams. Until I did.

Strap yourself in. This is a long one but I really do encourage you to read until the end so that you never find yourself in this position…

We’d worked out where we were on Google Maps, applied some sun lotion and had set off down the street to the seafront when a friendly man approached us and asked if we had any change for the parking meter. He was holding a €2 coin. We used to mainly deal in cash when we were abroad but, since the pandemic when everything became cashless, we tend to use our debit cards or phones to pay for everything so we normally wouldn’t have been able to help. However, I did have a coin purse containing a very small amount of money from our last European holiday a few years ago – a €5 note and coins adding to roughly five euros. I also had my debit card in there and one of those cards that stops your card being cloned, purchased after my business card got cloned while visiting North Wales on holiday last summer. But that’s another story.

So, knowing I didn’t have many coins in my purse, I tipped them out onto the wall we were standing next to thinking I might have €1 and a couple of 50 cent coins to change his €2 coin for him. I didn’t and apologised that I couldn’t help.

The friendly man then asked whether I could pay for his parking on the nearby machine using my debit card and he’d give me the money instead. Alarm bells should have been ringing at that point as suddenly the request for change for a €2 coin had become something else and I can look back now and think: If €2 was the lowest coin he had and it’s more than he needs for the parking meter, why would he be offering to pay me €2 to put it on my debit card because that would mean that he’s still over-paying? But do you know why the alarm bells didn’t ring? Because he’d distracted me by whipping out his debit card and showing me that it was damage so my focus was now on his inability to pay at all and not that he needed change. And also the alarm bells weren’t ringing because I’m a nice person who likes to believe other people are nice. Looking back now, I realise that the damaged corner on his debit card (which probably wasn’t his anyway) would not have caused him any problems in paying contactless. But that thought didn’t occur to me at the time.

So off I toddle with him to the parking meter over the road while his ‘wife’ distracts my husband and daughter. Tells them they’re Polish and that they’re loving their holiday in Majorca. Tells them they’ve just visited the nearby caves and produces a leaflet, apologising for her broken English as she says how beautiful the caves are and that they’re well worth a visit.

In the meantime, I’m at the parking meter and the friendly man who seems to speak pretty good English is telling me I need to hold my card against the contactless pad, which I do. He feeds a coin into the meter and I think: That’s odd because I’m meant to be paying by card here. Do parking meters work differently in Spain?

I can’t speak any Spanish and I certainly can’t read it and I’m feeling under pressure to follow his instructions because another older man has appeared (friendly man was maybe in his 30s and the older man is older than me – maybe in his 60s) wanting to pay for his parking and not looking too chuffed that I’m faffing at the meter.

‘You need to put your PIN number in now,’ the friendly man tells me. I don’t question this as I don’t often use my debit card and it’s fairly likely a PIN entry is due. But as I’m typing it in, I notice the numbers are showing up on the screen on the parking meter and an alarm bell does sound. Something is off here. Could this be a scam? But I can’t work out how. What good is my PIN number to him when I have my debit card? The man is still being really friendly and thanking me for my help and, like an absolute idiot, I’m falling for it.

In fact nice, gullible me is more concerned for the man at this point. ‘I think you’re meant to put your registration number in there,’ I say, ‘not my PIN number.’ I’m worried he’s going to get a parking fine.

I can’t remember at what point he produced it but he has a €10 note which I now have in my hand to thank me for my trouble. I think he might have given me it before I did the contactless and PIN number thing although it’s possible he handed it to me afterwards. That part is a bit blurry.

The machine spits out a parking ticket and I look at the cost - €2. My head is mashed now. That’s the amount he was wanting change for in the first place so if he was planning to pay €2 for the parking, why did he need me? 

‘I don’t understand what’s happening,’ I keep repeating, feeling disorientated at this point. Something isn’t right but I can’t work out what. I look over at hubby and daughter chatting to the ‘wife’ who is sitting on the wall onto which I’d previously tipped out my coins. They look relaxed and don’t seem to think anything untoward is happening so I assume it’s just me and the language / unfamiliar parking meter situation.

I’m looking at the €10 note in my hand and the €2 ticket the friendly man has and I tell him €10 is too much. I take my €5 note out my purse and hand him it. He gives me it back. Actually, he puts it in my purse and zips it closed and pats the zip as if to say be careful with your money; you never know who’s around. That gesture gives me some reassurance. He’s just a friendly man for whom I’ve done a favour. Or is he? Again, something seems off and I have the strongest sensation I’m being conned but still can’t work out how.

We have a bit more of me trying to get him to take the €5 note from me and him closing my purse again and tapping it saying I’ve been really friendly and helpful and he doesn’t need change.

I rejoin hubby and daughter. The ‘wife’ has disappeared. I didn’t see where she went. Then friendly man asks if we want the parking ticket. My head is even more mashed now. I repeat that I don’t understand what’s going on. First he wanted change for €2, then he wanted to give me €10 to thank me for putting a €2 charge on my card and then he didn’t even want the parking ticket I’d bought him???

What’s the scam? I’m sure it’s a scam but I don’t understand how.

He has another favour to ask of me. Can I take a photo of him in front of the pretty church? He hands me his phone. We go through this silly rigmarole of him being in a shadow and me asking him to cross the road and go up the steps towards the church so he’s in sunlight. He must have found that hilarious. He poses for a few photos and I’m wondering why his wife isn’t in the photos with him but, as I say, she’s disappeared. Again, it all feels very odd. I’m not happy. Something is wrong but I still can’t work out what.

Friendly man offers to take a photo of us on my phone, but I refuse. I’m very funny about handing my phone to strangers. He’s taken enough of our time on our day out. We say goodbye. As we continue down the street, I say to the husband that it doesn’t feel right and something’s off. He tells me I’m just being suspicious for no reason and that the man was just really friendly.

Except he wasn’t. 

We reached the seafront. It was beautiful but I couldn’t take it in because alarm bells were clanging. I opened my banking app and looked at the pending payments, seeking out anything that didn’t seem right but they were all payments we’d made across the holiday. Maybe I was just being paranoid.

The daughter and I love a gift shop called Ale-Hop. If you’ve been to Spain or the Canary Islands (and possibly other places – not sure how far the reach is), you might have been in it. We call it ‘the cow shop’ because each store has a large cow outside (obvs not a real one!) We always make a few purchases. I chose some bracelets and went to pay with my phone but it was declined. I tried again and it didn’t work so I called hubby over who paid on his. As I’m looking at my phone, wondering why Apple Pay hasn’t worked, a text notification from my bank comes up: We’ve just seen activity on your card ending XXXX and blocked it in case it wasn’t you. It said another text would follow with the details. That text told me that a transaction for £172.01 had been attempted and, if it was me, I could reply to remove the block but if it wasn’t me, I needed to call the fraud team.

I showed the husband the text. ‘I knew something was wrong.’ But there was worse to come… 

We stood outside Ale-Hop while I waited for my call to be connected. The pre-connection message told me I’d need my sort code and bank account so I asked the daughter to take my coin purse out my bag and remove my debit card out ready.

‘It’s not in here,’ she said, showing me the purse in which the only card was the scanner blocker.

I felt sick. The friendly man who put my €5 change back in my purse and zipped it up with a gesture to protect my money had liberated my debit card at the same time and was really zipping up my purse so that I didn’t realise that. I suspect if I’d had other cards in there or more than one note, he’d have taken them too.

And it got worse… 

I cannot praise the fraud department enough. The woman I spoke to was really understanding and helped keep me calm while I explained what had happened. There’d been a transaction in a gift shop – yes, that was me in Ale Hop. There’d been an online payment to some caves – also me before we left the hotel for our trip to the Dragon Caves. There’d been the £172.01 attempt in the supermarket but the card was already blocked at that point and the payment didn’t go through because a flag had been raised following a successful £498.27 withdrawal from an ATM (the odd amount presumably being a round number in euros).

Argh!!!! That nice, friendly man had stolen nearly £500 from my bank account.

There followed several further attempts to get money from an ATM - £400, £250, £200, £150 … presumably hoping that a smaller amount would go through but the card stop meant they didn’t get money out from any of them and they didn’t get the £172.01 at the supermarket either.

I spent 40 minutes of my holiday on the phone to the fraud department as the first operator couldn’t get her system to log the time difference of an hour and had to get a colleague to do it but they were brilliant and I did get the £498.27 reimbursed to my account the following day. I don’t understand how that works. Obviously it’s fraud but the fraudsters got £500 from the bank that won’t be recovered.

Husband and daughter realise a few odd things now that they know I’ve been scammed. The lovely ‘wife’ who claimed to be Polish definitely didn’t have a Polish accent and, when my daughter mentioned that her auntie had recently visited Krakow, clearly had no recognition of where that was. For someone who’d supposedly just visited the caves, she had a dog-eared leaflet (clearly whipped out many times to distract the victim’s family). She got in the car with the older man who’d been waiting for the parking meter.

Isn’t it funny how, at the point you know you’ve been scammed, you can see all the pieces of the puzzle and what doesn’t add up? It’s so clever and I suspect this team just move from place to place doing the same thing, sometimes getting away with a lot of money before the bank spots something and sometimes not quite so much.

I’m so glad I didn’t hand over my phone. I bet he’d have cloned it if I had and I’d have been saying goodbye to goodness knows what information/money. I’m shuddering just thinking about it.

As I said earlier, I always thought I wouldn’t be daft enough to fall for anything like this. I’m so vigilant on holiday. I keep my passport in a safe, I never have my phone or money anywhere accessible… and then a friendly person with a big smile asking for change for a parking meter – something so simple which used to be so common in the UK when all meters were coin-operated only – and I wanted to help. Instead, he helped himself to £500 from my bank account.

I didn’t report it to the police. I didn’t need to for the bank and I certainly wasn’t going to miss out on any more of my holiday. But now I wonder if I maybe should have. How many crimes like this are not part of the statistics because the victim doesn’t report them? It probably makes things so much easier for the scammer because they know that the person will deal with their bank instead of the police when they become aware they’ve been scammed.

I now have the massive inconvenience of waiting for a replacement card to arrive in the post and having to change my pin number but, most of all, I have the shame I feel. I was kind to someone I thought needed help and they stole from me. The three of them won’t have any conscience about this. They’ve probably forgotten about me already as there’ll have been many other victims in the meantime, but I can’t forget this. I didn’t sleep at all well that night, the conversations with him, the alarm bells, the confusion all swirling round in my head and, oh my word, the embarrassment.

I’m back at my desk ready to work and I can’t stop thinking about it. We had a week away in a beautiful place and this is my strongest memory. When my business card was cloned last year and ‘they’ attempted several fraudulent transactions on it, it was awful but I’d done nothing wrong – somebody had walked past me at some point with a card reader and taken my details. This time, I’m to blame. I did so many things wrong and, worst of all, I knew something didn’t feel right as soon as he separated me from my family and got me to enter my PIN number into the parking meter. But my brain couldn’t get in gear thanks to an unfamiliar country, a foreign language, and the cleverness of the second man impatiently waiting to pay for his parking ticket meaning I had to rush. 

Isn’t it crazy that I’m blaming myself? Those three pathetic excuses for human beings took advantage of me, stole my card and stole my money but I see it as my fault. Too kind, too trusting, too friendly, too helpful and I hate that this has made me feel like I would never want to help anyone again. What a sorry world we live in where we can’t be kind to strangers because of scum like this.

And to top it all, we returned to the UK and had a stopover in York for a gig. The gig was fantastic – Ward Thomas who I’ve wanted to see for years – but hubby and I went for tea in York beforehand while the daughter met a friend of hers who is at uni there. We had a wander afterwards to kill some time before I met the daughter for the gig and we found ourselves at Clifford’s Tower. There are lots of steps going up to the tower and there are a few benches to the side of the steps. We decided to sit on one of those benches. I leaned back and leapt up again with a searing pain in my back. Wasp sting! Little bugger must have rested on the back of the bench just as I leaned back and it stung me through my dress. Soooo painful. So then we needed to find a mini supermarket with some Savlon in stock to try and soothe the pain before the gig.

Anyway, that’s my sorry little holiday story. Please, please, please do be careful abroad. Ridiculously, I do seem to remember reading about a scam like this some time back and it drifted out of my head in an it’ll never happen to me kind of cloud. But it did happen and, even though I got the money back, it’s going to take me a long time to get over the shame. If ever. Please don’t let this happen to you.

Also, if you’re heading to Majorca and particularly Porto Cristo, please don’t be put off. This could happen anywhere. This is a beautiful island and Porto Cristo is a beautiful village, as you can see from my photos. It’s well worth exploring. Just don’t be kind to anyone allegedly wanting change for a parking meter or any other purpose.

Big scam-free hugs
Jessica xx