5 days ago
An Aussie tourist exchanged money in Bali... she then noticed something unacceptable and confronted the worker behind the counter
An Aussie tourist has shared an urgent warning after confronting a currency exchange converter in Bali and accusing them of trying to scam her.
The woman claimed she had visited a centre in Kuta on Monday after being lured in by false exchange rates on the signage at the front.
She said she still agreed to do business after learning the real rate - and converted around $94AUD in exchange for roughly $1million IDR.
The unsuspecting tourist then left the shop before she and her partner discovered they were missing $600,000 IDR.
Fraudulent converters will offer to count the exchanged cash for a final time after both parties are satisfied with the amount.
In the final count, the converter will use a sleight-of-hand technique to drop some of the cash back behind their desk.
The Australian filmed herself approaching the store worker to accuse him of conning her.
'Where's my money?' she asked him in the TikTok video.
'My (IDR) $600,000, you dropped inside. I'm putting it on the internet now,' she said.
'You took it back, counted it again, dropped 600.'
The vendor then fumbled around and eventually handed the woman a wad of notes from his drawer.
The tourist gave it to her partner, asking him to count the notes.
'Why do you do that to people? It's not nice,' she asked the cashier.
'We come here to give you business and you take away from us.'
'Yes, I'm sorry,' he replied.
Social media users said they had experienced similar scams in Bali.
'I learnt about this kind of scam on my first trip to Bali in 2006,' one said.
'My best friend and I were naïve young travellers, and only realised when we got back to our hotel and were joking around about having 1million Rupiah, only to count it and realise several hundred thousand were missing.'
She said the vendors acted innocent until she threatened to call the police.
A second said they had also fallen victim to the trap.
'I lost about AUD$100, [it] was 30min away from my hotel so [I] didn't bother going back. [I] looked at it as a donation to Balinese people, but sucks they scammed,' he wrote.
Another viewer said money exchanges may give cash to clients in the form of 'lots of little notes' to add to the confusion.
'These money changers are minefields. Been like this for over 30 years,' another noted.
