Noltonn

Every day man. Every. Single. Day.

Seriously? My supermarket has a "cop", basically a bouncer. Nobody will fuck with that guy. He's big, he's black, and he'll fuck you up. We once grabbed a pack of cigs ourselves and put them on by the till and the guy swooped down and had us pissing ourselves just saying the words "Don't do that again".

TL;DR: Be more black.

Yep, it's definitely fraud, and while I don't know exactly where OP is from, I'd say this is such a blatant example of fraud 99% of countries their fraud laws would cover this as fraud. If they would actually ever give a shit about it, I don't know, but it most certainly is fraud, and illegal.

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I always suggest the free walking tours to people. Most touristy locations have them, and even a lot of non-touristy. They're usually done by enthusiastic English speaking young people, they take you around the city and you can usually ask them anything you want at the end. It's also pay what you want, leave when you want, so if the person that's leading isn't any good, you can just walk away. Though if it's good, it's common courtesy to give at least like 5-10 Euro or whatever.

It's a thing travelers suffer from quite a bit, and I have as well: Tourist syndrome. Or that's what I've heard people call it. Basically, if you don't spend anywhere long enough to create real emotional bonds to places and people, you will eventually try to distance yourself from the emotionally. You might still be very social, fun and outgoing, but you're unable to make a real emotional connection. Sometimes this also means that they are just basically looking for the next story to tell. I know a couple folks like that, where it seems like they're constantly trying to create a story they can tell to the next group they meet next week, because that's really all they have.

Basically, you might see these people as shallow, but it's just that their circumstances have forced them to treat people in a different way. Every social interaction they have, they know won't lead to anything deeper because they know they'll be gone in a few months, weeks or even days. And if you meet so many new people in a short window of time, it's actually very hard to make any kind of a personal connection to any single one of them.

Or some of them genuinely were shallow douches. But what I said was the case for me when I did that shit. But yeah, some people really do look down on "normal" people. The people that do that suck. Ever hear them do the slightly condescending "Oh I would love to do the whole settling down thing, I'm just not built for that sort of a life, but it's awesome that you're able to!"? Yeah, screw them sideways.