Drop & Break Scam
Good morning and welcome back to Fraud Friday! Today, we are talking about another street scam. Known as Drop and Break Scams or Broken Bottle Scams. Here’s how it works. A con man walks around carrying a bag filled with broken or breakable glass and deliberately bumps into a gullible person (i.e., anyone wearing a fanny pack) and drops his cargo. The mark is accused of breaking the bottle and guilted or intimidated into paying for a replacement. There are several variations on this trick—sometimes the grifter uses eyeglasses, sometimes he claims that the mark broke a bottle of prescription medicine. Broken glass can be very lucrative: One longtime bottle trickster, sentenced to 20 years to life for attempting to scam a visiting Swedish naval officer before threatening him with a knife, said in court that he pulled the trick up to 10 times per day. Assuming $20 to $40 per successful scam, that’s a pretty decent day’s wage.
Obviously, the easiest thing to do when faced with an aggrieved, broken-bottle-wielding con man is to pay the money, avoid confrontation, and walk away feeling terrible about yourself. But this is America, and in America, as I understand it, we don’t give in to terrorists or small-time hustlers. So here are a few suggestions for what you might do if you find yourself caught up in this scam.
Run away, toward a crowd. The bottle scam often works because the victims feel physically threatened by the scammers. Don’t let yourself get into a situation where you feel like you’re in danger. If someone bumps into you and you hear the sound of broken glass, run away while yelling loudly for help. These guys don’t want to attract attention. Odds are they won’t follow you.
Raise your voice. To be clear: Running away (and other non-confrontational responses) is still probably the best strategy here, but sometimes you just don’t want to move. Fair enough. If you do stick around, though, you have to give the scammer the sense that he picked the wrong person to mess with. The bottle tricksters are betting that you’ll be intimidated by them. But if you yell louder than they do or trump their menace with some craziness of your own, they might back down and look for an easier target. Of course, they might also respond by trumping you with a whole new level of craziness. Very much a double-edged sword; however, an option to be sure.
Come back next Friday for another dose of knowledge!