Field Notes

Reader-submitted reports over the past month have shifted the documented Marrakech ATM-skimming concentration from the Jemaa el-Fna ATMs toward the bank of standalone machines on Avenue Mohammed V near Gueliz. Three independent reports over four weeks all describe the same pattern: pinhole camera + chip-shimmer combination on Euronet-branded machines.

We have downgraded the Jemaa el-Fna ATM warning's frequency score from 7 to 5, and added Avenue Mohammed V as the new high-frequency location for the Marrakech money-category entries. Bank-branch ATMs (Attijariwafa, BMCE) inside business hours remain the lowest-risk option city-wide.

The quarterly freshness review against the source catalogue surfaced 47 scam entries with no corroborating source within the past 12 months. The breakdown: 18 retired (no longer documented anywhere current), 22 downgraded (still active but lower frequency than previously scored), 7 retained at current scores after fresh corroboration was found.

The retirements concentrate in destinations where formal enforcement has tightened — particularly Singapore, Tokyo, and Reykjavík, where several long-standing low-severity entries are no longer reported in any source category. Full retirement criteria: see the [methodology page, section 6](https://beforeyougotravels.com/methodology#retirement).

The decades-old Bangkok scam where a friendly local informs tourists the Grand Palace is closed for a holiday and offers an alternative tuk-tuk tour has, per multiple Reddit r/travel and TripAdvisor reports this month, started running in Mandarin and Russian alongside English. Operators are adapting to the changed source-market mix as Chinese and Russian visitor counts have recovered to 2019 levels.

The defense is unchanged: verify Grand Palace opening times via the official Bureau of the Royal Household website, not from anyone who approaches you near the entrance. The pattern's frequency score remains at 10 — the longest-running entry on the Bangkok page.

Three independent reports in the first half of April document a return of counterfeit Machu Picchu ticket sales by individuals approaching tourists on Plaza de Armas. The fakes look closer to the official ticket format than 2024-era counterfeits and have passed casual inspection at hotel concierge desks. The actual gate at Aguas Calientes still catches them, but tourists are then turned away on the morning of the visit.

We have raised the Cusco "fake ticket" entry's frequency score from 6 to 8 and added a specific location callout. The only safe purchase channels remain the official Peruvian government portal and the Aguas Calientes ticket office — never from individuals on Plaza de Armas.

Embassy and consular security alerts have been formalized as the fifth source category in our review process. Previously they were monitored on an ad-hoc basis through the same channels as government travel advisories; we have separated them because their cadence is meaningfully different — embassies issue alerts within hours of significant events, while State Department advisories typically lag by days or weeks.

The change does not affect existing destination pages but improves the freshness of post-event re-reviews. Full source catalogue: see [methodology, section 1](https://beforeyougotravels.com/methodology#sources).

Six weeks of forum reports and one Italian-language news write-up document a noticeable shift in the Trevi Fountain bracelet operation: morning hours (before 11am) are largely clear; the operators concentrate between 1pm and 6pm, when tourist density is highest and crowd dynamics make refusal harder.

The same pattern is reported around the Spanish Steps. We have not changed the bracelet entry's overall frequency score, but the location_context now notes the time-of-day clustering. Visiting these sites in the morning hours has measurably lower documented incident rates than afternoon visits.

Post-Carnival reports document elevated snatch-theft activity on Copacabana and Ipanema beaches through April — the seasonal pattern we have flagged in the past, where operators who scaled up for the festival continue working the beaches as tourist density slowly normalizes.

Phones held in the hand on the beachfront promenade and bags left unattended on the sand remain the dominant incident contexts. The Rio entry's frequency score for beach snatch theft is at 9 year-round and 10 during the Carnival-and-aftermath window (mid-February through May).

Two TripAdvisor reports and a Reddit r/solotravel report describe a variant of the long-standing Barcelona spray-the-tourist scam now operating around La Sagrada Família rather than its traditional Las Ramblas concentration. The mechanism is identical — substance applied to clothing by a passing individual, accomplice offers to clean it, third operator removes valuables — but the location shift to a less-warned-about tourist site has caught visitors who had been briefed on Las Ramblas only.

We have updated the Barcelona street-scam entries to include La Sagrada Família and Park Güell as documented locations alongside Las Ramblas and the Metro. Defensive practice is unchanged.

Q1 2026 reports from Moroccan tourism-board sources show pressure-tactic complaints around the Jemaa el-Fna snake charmers up materially year-over-year, attributed to the post-2024 recovery in tourist volume outpacing local enforcement capacity.

The pattern is unchanged: services are provided unsolicited (snake placed on shoulders, henna applied to hand) followed by demands for tens of euros. The defense is unchanged — firmly decline any unsolicited service in the square, do not allow physical contact, and walk away if a service is rendered without your agreement. We have raised the Jemaa el-Fna entry's frequency score by one notch.

The Q1 2026 frequency-score recalibration ran against all 4,800+ published scams across our 444 destinations. Net result: 312 scores adjusted (most by a single integer), 47 entries flagged for retirement review (subject to the freshness check in note 2), and 11 destinations had their dominant-category designation change.

Recalibrations are run quarterly by editorial against the source corpus described in the [methodology source catalogue](https://beforeyougotravels.com/methodology#sources). The next recalibration is scheduled for July 2026.