Who we are

Travelscams.org is the world’s largest community project on travel scams and key safety issues, with 1604 tourist targeted scams and 523 user stories shared on 81 countries.

We empower travellers to travel far and wide without fear and worry.

Ever wondered how it feels like to glide along the Ganges in India’s holiest City, to trek along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu or to witness the wildebeest migration in Maasai Mara?

Just go, as we have you covered on all potential pitfalls you may face.

Our story

This project was first inspired when David fell for a cyclo scam in Ho Chi Minh City in 2010, causing him to lose 30% of his budget on the 1st day of his trip.

The scam was actually documented online but he was just ignorant. However, what struck him was that many years later (and not withstanding the years before 2010), many continued to fall prey. That, inspired the creation of this site in 2014. By the way, this scam is still around today, in 2019!

With fellow travellers from 10+ other countries, we aim to create a community led platform that consolidates all tourist targeted scams as well as key safety issues (e.g. crime, civil unrest, terrorism, medical, natural disasters, transport safety) to watch out for.

Many of these cases go unreported and sometimes, there is not much that local police can do. Thus, it is down to us as a community of travellers to look out for one another.

How the site works

Instead of having to trawl through long, very general posts scattered all over the web, you can filter scams by cities and these are shown in bullet points for a fast, easy read (Google actually ranks articles higher if they are long with many words but that to us is a lousy user experience. Brevity is better).

User stories are also collected for extra colour and votes are cast to surface only the most relevant and common pitfalls one may face.

In short, this site aims to educate and to prevent, not to scare or to sensationalize for page views. In fact, vast majority of trips are trouble-free, as long as research is done and common sense exercised.

That said, you need to be ready whenever you are targeted by professionals who have been doing this day in and day out for years.

It is our dream one day that all of us can travel anywhere in the world we want safely, as true freedom, lies in being bold.