Japan's WORST Tourist Scam Explained | $6,000 Lost in a Day

how safe is japan really everybody always has a new crime to be had theft violent crime despair things that i've not really experienced in 10 years living in japan well maybe not despair i mean the price of family mart fried chickens gone up 18 yen this month alone that is the real despair that is the real crime look you probably don't need me to tell you that statistically speaking japan is one of the safest countries in the world with amongst the lowest rates of violent crime and theft and in fact this year japan hit a post-war low for the seventh year running for reported crimes domestically now i'd be incredibly naive to tell you that japan is some kind of utopia you know there's a reason there are women only train carriages and in recent years there have been some highly publicized crimes that have shocked the nation and triggered headlines around the world and on a slightly more bizarre note this week two monkeys went on a rampage around yamaguchi prefecture injuring over 60 people in scenes that sound like something out of 28 days later but ruthless monkeys aside for the most part everyday life in japan is very safe many people leave their front doors unlocked it's not uncommon to see people leaving their worldly possessions on the coffee shop table when they go to the restaurant which coming from the uk always seems like a colossal act of bravery if you drive through the countryside you'll see these unmanned stands just selling fruit and vegetables deposit the money in a coin box and take it away and there's nobody there there's a level of trust in everyday society that feels largely absent back in the uk which i think is very sad honestly i think the only time i felt threatened in japan was last week when i walked past an ice cream shop with a very direct and intimidating slogan i love my cows you will too but this atmosphere of safety and trust can give you a full sense of security if you come here as a tourist and today i want to tell you a story and unfortunately it's not a nice story like the wizard of oz or harry potter and the goblet of secrets this is the story of a couple that came to japan on their honeymoon and walked away with six thousand dollars of credit card debt and probably not a very good image of the country either and when japan finally reopens to taurus sometime in the not so distant future for the first time in two to three billion years i don't want anyone to go through this ever again you know i feel a huge sense of regret for not talking about this sooner because i might have been able to prevent this viewer from enduring the nightmare that they went through and i think one reason i've never discussed it is because japan is safe i didn't want to come across like i was scare-mongering but time and again i've heard horror stories like this hopefully in this video we can make sure you don't end up abroad in a scam i brought in a skit sorry i couldn't resist oh jesus but before you come to japan make sure you don't get scammed online either up until a few years ago i didn't even know what a vpn was now when i'm online it feels wrong to surf the net without one like driving a car without a seat belt or flying an airplane without fingers yeah expressvpn has been my go-to vpn for the last two years and when they contacted me asking to sponsor an abroad japan video i said yes what took you so long as someone who's always on the go and reliant on public wi-fi when i'm traveling it's worryingly easy for others to connect to the same network and steal data passwords account logins or even credit card details expressvpn helps me secure my connection no matter the public wi-fi that i use make expressvpn your first line of defense and encrypt your every move online it's encrypted but i just did admittedly when i first got expressvpn it wasn't for security reasons but to access websites back home in the uk that you couldn't get in japan for example while you can't watch studio ghibli movies on netflix in japan you can in the uk meaning i can now watch my neighbor totoro not the horrific fan art edition either find out how you can get three months free on expressvpn by clicking the link in the description box below at expressvpn.com forward slash abroad japan now as a tourist in japan there's only two real scams you need to be aware of one of them is quite serious um this one where they lost six thousand dollars the other one seems almost trivial in comparison is more of a inconvenience i'd say and today i'll explain both using stories kindly sent in by viewers that have experienced them first hand the scam you need to worry about the most is in tokyo and to be more specific in the districts of shinjuku roppongi and to a lesser extent bueno and shibuya as well and the one thing all these areas have in common is historically they're very touristy places the story we're going to read out today is actually in kabukicho i don't want to put people off kabukicho though it is a very cool place the food's amazing the nightlife's awesome the atmosphere is incredible and in fact this set is kind of modelled on kabukicho i love it i should have just filmed all my videos there instead of building this ridiculously elaborate set but i was there only a week ago it's not an inherently dangerous place and it's changed a heck of a lot in the last decade it's far more gentrified now and there's a lot more hotels and so there's a good chance you'll stay there if you do come to tokyo but there's one rule you need to follow if you do go there and that is never ever ever follow one of the touts into a bar and if you follow that rule you can basically switch the video off now and have a nice day unfortunately a lot of people do follow the street outs they're pretty nice people they're very engaging and good at what they do and they're there to get you off the street and into a bar and you might be thinking oh yeah it's obvious don't follow them that's a golden rule for not just japan but many countries but i think a lot of people get lulled into that full sense of security given that it is japan given that it is an inherently safe country now the touts that target foreigners specifically are actually foreigners themselves they're not japanese they're nigerian guys that have been given visas to come over and basically kind of do this and work for these organizations in the area they have two very good skills number one they're very friendly and engaging and number two they're very persistent once you start speaking to someone you can't get rid of them and it gets very difficult and if you're none the wiser to the scam either you or your group of friends might say yeah who doesn't want free drinks i'd love a free drink let's go and away you go to a bar that's typically hidden several stories up in one of the buildings down that very neon lit district now once you get inside one of these bars you are for lack of a better phrase pretty screwed you are going to get charged extortionate prices for drinks three four five times what you're expected to pay when the bill comes the odds are you're going to query it you're going to be like no i'm not paying 200 for what was 20 30 of drinks and it's at this point you won't be allowed to leave the bar there'll be a group of people blocking the door basically preventing you from leaving until you either pull out the cash or a credit card in some cases if you don't have cash they might take you to an atm they'll like frog march you to your [ __ ] atm and watch you get the money out it's pretty insane don't think just because you've got no cash on you you've got a magical get out of jail free card they'll still get the money out of you somehow and those free drinks and reasonable prices you have promised at the start of the night have gone on to become the most expensive drinks you've probably ever had but the worrying thing is that's actually a pretty good variation of the scam that's a less severe one than the one we're going to read out now because it can go much worse than that uh as laura found out with her husband when she came to japan uh two or three years ago for her honeybee she begins so my husband and i were in japan and started our trip in tokyo we were staying in shinjuku and pre-booked the robot restaurant for the evening on sunday robot restaurant used to be this kind of place where people dressed up like robots danced around it was fun i guess but i think it's closed now covered reason we had a few beers during the show and got chatting to a few english couples who sat near us the show finished and we all agreed with the other couples to carry on for a few drinks together leaving the robot restaurant and we decided we should find a karaoke bar we wanted the streets in kabukicho for just a couple of minutes before one of our group neither me nor my husband i got chatting to a towel on the street i didn't hear the conversation so i don't know what was offered but in any event we found ourselves in a bar and were taken to a karaoke room and we brought several trays of drinks for the group my husband sang a bit of karaoke as did the others in the group but then at that point we don't remember much at all we blacked out next thing i knew it was several hours later and we were in the same bar but in a different room and a hostess girl was basically sat on top of me and i looked over and my husband was in exactly the same situation let's just say these girls were extremely handsy and doing stuff to us without any consent i also recall the street out coming over several times with trays of drinks i remember being in a totally zombie-like state as i saw my husband kissing a hostess girl and i had pretty much zero reaction so definitely confident we were drugged for that reason if i was just drunk i'd have been angry or upset to see something like this but instead i was weirdly motionless right pause for a minute this is insane imagine watching your husband your new husband kissing some hostess girl right next to you and feeling nothing they've clearly been drugged and this is something that some of the bars do they put like sleeping tablets and other things in the drink to basically knock you out and make you in this sort of vulnerable state and once the people in the bar do this they basically got you know free reign with your credit card with your wallet laura continues after that all i recall was being in a taxi trying to get back to our hotel i had no cash in my purse and had to pay for the taxi on my credit card miraculously we made it back to the hotel next morning we woke up and i looked in my purse to find my debit card was gone which prompted me to check my online banking a transaction appeared for around 2 500 my husband checked his account and he had lost the same amount of money roughly the exact same amount then i checked my credit card and there was another transaction for around a thousand dollars in total between the two of us we had just over six thousand dollars gone from our accounts six thousand dollars for the worst night out ever after a bit more searching and as the most horrendous hangover in my life wore off we realized my bank card was in fact in my husband's wallet one of his cards was in my purse which makes me think the staff have probably just helped themselves swipe them and then put them in the wrong wallets next day we reported to the police he weren't particularly interested and told us to take it up with our banks the banks weren't interested as they said it was an authorized transaction and we'd have to take it up with the bar which we obviously had no intention of doing since at this point we knew it was probably run by a criminal organization i don't even know the name of the bar it comes up on our bank statements as primetime bar but google just brings up nothing from that name in shinjuku so yeah that's it basically we couldn't wait to leave tokyo and now we're in debt unfortunately never ever follow a street towel she ends the message with this is without a doubt one of the worst real-life horror stories i've heard of anyone who's ever traveled to japan you might be skeptical and think they're clearly exaggerating it can't be that amount of money but i've heard this story dozens of times from viewers from listeners of the podcast this is probably the highest amount of money i've heard but everything in this story there's nothing new there this is something that happens in tokyo you need to be careful of it never follow a street towel always be careful and hopefully you won't ever have to endure what laura and her husband went through on this occasion a few years ago i did this crazy maniacal 2000 kilometer cycle across japan and on day three i was in niigata prefecture beautiful area lots of rice fields nothing going on incredibly remote and all of a sudden i saw this car up ahead i was cycling along i saw a car and it was a car that had driven past me about a mile back um so i was a little bit worried at first i was like oh crap you know have i done something or something gone wrong here and there was a sort of middle-aged woman by the driver's side standing there ushering me over sort of waving to grab my attention which is quite odd you know people don't really do that in japan so i thought oh maybe she needs help so i pulled over on my bike and i sort of said hello how are you doing and she was like you know where are you from what are you doing here why are you in japan the usual sort of generic questions and i just said i'm cycling across japan to kagoshima off to nigata city today and she said won't you come with me to a party right now and i was like what what did you say and she was like yeah there's a party right now come along to my house with my friends let's have a party and i was like oh i think i've got to get going right now and she's like no no no it's gonna be amazing there's biscuits don't you like biscuits i was like biscuits aside i've got to get going i've got to get get cycling and she was really persistent right this is quite a rare abnormal interaction to have but at one point she pulled out her phone and it was a photo of some very bewildered and confused foreigners just sitting on a sofa with like a cake looking just like why am i here like kind of that kind of expression and i thought i'm gonna be like that if i say yes in the end the only way i could escape this bizarre interaction was to genuinely start sort of getting on my bike and walking away at which point she was like okay maybe next time here's some biscuits and i was like all right biscuits yeah i got something out of this awkward interaction uh and we did put it in the video and a lot of uh viewers sort of speculated as to what was going on there when the video came out now i'd like to tell you that this is some kind of elaborate biscuit scam where you get cakes and biscuits and a party it's magic but unfortunately it's a little bit more sinister than that i expect because this isn't the first time this has happened to me this kind of interaction a few years ago i was sitting in sapporo park waiting just beneath the tower fanatsuki to return from another bloody smoking group go [ __ ] yourself anyway i was sitting on this bench and a middle-aged woman came over and started speaking kind of the old generic questions what are you doing why are you here why japan it was a fairly unremarkable conversation but all of a sudden she pulled out this pamphlet and stuck it in my hand and i looked at it and it was for this very unimpressive looking buddhist kind of sect some sort of almost cult like looking place and she was like we can make you happy and i was like look at my face i'm already happy you know but she was very insistent that i joined her right there right then and we go off and learn the ways of buddha for a reasonable price but right then thankfully natsuki turned up and she sort of got very embarrassed and ran away very quickly but i think those two experiences were connected by the fact they were both effectively trying to get me to go to some religious meeting or some sort of cult and they do target foreign travelers quite often uh maybe it's just to make a quick buck can you believe it religion trying to make money who'd have thought of it i hate to say it but whenever someone comes up to me now and starts talking to me in a very friendly uh unusual manner i just assume that i'm going to be dragged off to a cult and i've always wondered what would have happened if i'd said yes and now we know the answer because andrew from australia did just that on his trip to japan in the winter of 2017 i was passing through tokyo station when i was approached by two thirty-year-old women after exchanging a few words they immediately sprung upon me some shifty looking pamphlets about how their brand of buddhism would bring about world peace and happiness i was skeptical naturally and refused them a number of times but eventually my curiosity got the better of me and i accepted the two women took me on the train and we arrived in what could only be described as the middle of nowhere in tokyo they took me into their shrine which was nothing more than an office building situated in the middle of a quiet residential area bit of a red flag when the uh religion is just in a a random office building before we made our way into the main prayer hall which was on the second floor of the office block they handed me a prayer book written in japanese and some prayer beats they explained to me the rules of the prayer book and instructed me in ways that i had to sit and hold the magical beads after the explanation they whisked me away to the front of the hall where we sat in front of a gold-plated altar an elderly man meditated in front of the altar and began a soothing read of the buddhist prayers i was expected to follow along with the impassioned chants promoted by the two women keeping a close eye on me the process took over 40 minutes as we enchanted the entire 40-page prayer book i imagine this you're just on your day out in tokyo on your holiday next thing you know you're chanting in a room for 40 minutes holding prayer beads and this is just the next part is the most interesting part the cult it seems turned out to be a pyramid scheme i was taken into an initiation ceremony where a woman spoke to me in really fast japanese she then coerced me into signing a bunch of documents that officiated my membership into the club the two women who took me to the session received some kind of award it seems they got promoted for bringing me to join their questionable religion at the end of it the two women wanted my address and contact details as they wanted to send me things related to the cult i gave them a fake address and after adding them on facebook i immediately blocked them they were very persistent that i should bring my friends the next time that i come i said i definitely would yeah and wave them goodbye and never saw them again overall it was an unforgettable experience all the best andrew from australia uh andrew there he likes to try all the religions of the world but again this isn't something uh to be skeptical about this is something that happens i've heard this story dozens of times from various viewers and listeners and if you're wondering why i've just got loads of random stories they're from the abroad japan podcast out every sunday and thursday on spotify and itunes i do a terrible job of plugging it even though we haven't missed a single episode in four years now but these are the two most common scams that you'll encounter there are more and in fact i was in shinjuku with connor cdawgva the other day we went into a bar and the menu was in both japanese and english and the japanese side was a lot more favorable than the english side was shall we say for example on the english side you had to order a drink every half an hour to stay in the bar and the prices were also a little bit inflated whereas the japanese side it was one drink every hour and the prices were cheaper as well maybe that's just golden gai in shinjuku but that's something to watch out for as well and unfortunately there's not really much he could do there if you can't speak japanese but obviously that's not as serious as the other scams and if you guys have ever encountered a scam like this on your travels around japan let us know in the comments share your experience whether it's these scams or any others be keen to hear them and hopefully prevent this from ever happening again when japan does reopen but for now guys as always many thanks for watching the abroad japan channel check out the abroad japan podcast in the description box below and as for me well all this talk of colts and biscuits has made me pretty hungry i'd bloody love some biscuits where's a cult when you need one

Channel: Abroad in Japan

Views: 2,787,700

Keywords: japan, travel japan, hotels japan, abroad in japan, chris abroad, trash taste

Id: NeZUOFKOUeI

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 08 2022