Methodology
& Standards.

Every scam entry on Before You Go derives from one or more of the eight source categories below. Each category is reviewed on its own cycle, and the editorial review process (section 7) requires corroboration across at least two of these categories before a scam is published.

1. Government travel advisories. US Department of State, UK Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), Canadian Travel Advice and Advisories, German Auswärtiges Amt, French Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires Étrangères, and equivalent agencies in other countries. These are the highest-weight source category — they reflect official patterns reported through diplomatic channels.
2. Established traveler community forums. TripAdvisor destination forums, Reddit r/travel and r/solotravel, Lonely Planet Thorn Tree, Fodor's travel forums, and equivalent regional communities. These provide the most current ground-level reports and capture scam patterns weeks or months before they appear in advisories.
3. National and local English-language news. Reuters, AP, BBC, Guardian, AFP, plus regional outlets covering specific destinations (Bangkok Post, Buenos Aires Times, Times of India, etc.). News coverage typically lags forums but provides the strongest evidence for any single high-severity event.
4. Tourist police and consumer protection agency reports. Where published — Polizia Turistica reports in Italy, Mossos d'Esquadra Barcelona statistics, Bangkok Tourist Police 1155 incident summaries, and equivalents.
5. Embassy and consular notices. Embassy security alerts, consular travel notes, and local-condition reports issued by host-country embassies of major source markets.
6. Reader-submitted reports. Scam reports submitted via the report form on any destination page. These enter the editorial review queue (section 7) and are not published until corroborated.
7. Industry associations and consumer organizations. Better Business Bureau (US), Trading Standards (UK), Consumers International, and tourism-specific bodies where credible.
8. Academic and research publications. Tourism studies journals, criminology research, and university-affiliated travel risk analyses where they document specific scam patterns.

A scam pattern is only published when at least two independent sources from different categories report substantially the same pattern. A government advisory plus a single forum post does not qualify as two independent sources — the two must come from different category numbers above.

Corroboration combines three factors:

• Independence. Two reports that derive from the same original incident (e.g., a news outlet and the embassy advisory it cites) count as one source, not two.
• Recency. Reports older than 18 months are weighted at 50%; reports older than 36 months are weighted at 25% unless the scam is structural (e.g., the Bangkok Grand Palace closed-today scam, which has been documented since the 1990s and remains active).
• Specificity. Reports describing the same location, mechanism, and target profile count more strongly than reports describing the same scam type abstractly.

The combined score determines whether the scam is published as verified (3+ independent recent sources), ai_generated (drawn from documented patterns synthesized into a destination-specific entry by editorial AI tooling, then human-reviewed), or held in pending_review until further corroboration is found.

Every scam carries one of three severity ratings. The rubric is applied consistently across all 450+ destinations.

Each scam is assigned an integer frequency score from 1 to 10. The score combines the number of independent sources reporting the pattern, the recency of those reports, and the consistency of the pattern over time.

• 10 — Documented continuously for 5+ years across all source categories. The scam is structural, not seasonal. Examples: Bangkok Grand Palace closed-today, Paris bracelet around Sacré-Cœur, Rome Colosseum gladiator photo demands.
• 7–9 — Documented across 3+ source categories within the past 24 months. Active scams with strong corroboration; the most likely patterns to encounter.
• 4–6 — Documented across 2 source categories or in a narrower time window. Real but less ubiquitous; worth knowing but lower hit rate for any given visitor.
• 1–3 — Documented but declining, recently emerged, or limited to specific seasonal contexts. Included for completeness; lower display priority.

Frequency scores are reviewed against the source corpus on a quarterly cycle. Scams with declining frequency over consecutive reviews are eligible for retirement (section 6).

Eight scam categories, applied consistently across every destination page so cross-destination patterns surface when readers compare cities.

Taxi

Scams involving licensed or unlicensed taxis, ride-share fraud, airport-transfer overcharging, and metering manipulation.

Street

Scams executed in public spaces — bracelet operators, petitioners, shell games, pickpocket distraction setups, photo-op pressure.

Restaurant

Menu pricing manipulation, undisclosed cover charges, bill-padding, fixed-rate dispute scams, tourist-menu fraud.

Accommodation

Fake listings, deposit fraud, room-quality misrepresentation, key-deposit retention, in-room theft tied to staff access.

Online

Fake booking sites, phishing during travel, public Wi-Fi credential theft, fraudulent ticket-resale platforms.

Tour

Tour operator misrepresentation, unofficial guides, fake religious-site guides, ticket-jumping touts at attractions.

Money

Currency exchange fraud, ATM skimming, dynamic currency conversion (DCC) at point of sale, counterfeit currency, shortchanging.

Other

Scams that don't fit cleanly into the seven above — drink-spiking, jet ski damage demands, festival-specific patterns, and edge cases.

Scams are not permanent entries. Patterns disappear, enforcement disrupts operators, and individual establishments close. The retirement process keeps the database current.

• 12-month freshness check. Any scam with no new corroborating source within 12 months is flagged for re-review. Editorial pulls fresh searches against the eight source categories before deciding to retain, downgrade, or retire.
• Downgrade. If the pattern still exists but at lower frequency, the frequency score is reduced and the entry remains published.
• Retire. If the pattern is no longer documented anywhere current, the entry's status is set to rejected in the database and it is removed from public view. The data is retained for archival but does not appear on destination pages.
• Major-event triggered re-review. When a destination is the subject of a significant event (large security incident, major regulatory change, formal closure of a tourist site), all of that destination's scams enter accelerated re-review within 30 days.

Three types of entries pass through the review queue before reaching public destination pages:

1. Reader-submitted reports. Submitted via the report form on any destination page. Each report is checked against the existing database for duplicates, then against the source catalogue for corroboration. Reports with no corroborating evidence remain in pending_review indefinitely; they are not published as standalone entries but are tracked in case future reports corroborate the pattern.
2. AI-assisted destination drafts. When a new destination is added, editorial tooling synthesizes documented scam patterns from the source catalogue into a destination-specific draft. The draft is reviewed by the editor before any entry is set to published. AI-assisted drafts are tagged with source = ai_generated for transparency.
3. Periodic agent runs. Five named research agents (SENTINEL, VIPER, PHANTOM, WRAITH, CIPHER) crawl source categories on different cadences and surface candidate updates to existing destinations. Each candidate enters the same review queue.

No entry reaches public view without editor sign-off. The editor of record for all 450+ destinations is Cody Campbell.

Different parts of the database update on different cycles, designed to balance freshness against editorial review capacity.

• Daily. Government advisory monitoring, breaking-news scan, reader-submitted report triage, top-20-destination forum scrape.
• Weekly. Full source catalogue refresh for the 50 highest-traffic destinations, scam alerts review, internal-link graph audit.
• Monthly. Full destination quality audit, near-duplicate detection, frequency-score recalibration on flagged scams.
• Quarterly. Frequency-score recalibration across the entire database, retirement review for entries flagged at the 12-month freshness check, methodology document review (this page).
• Annually. Year-reference updates in title tags and metadata, full editorial standards review, source catalogue audit (adding/removing categories where the source landscape has shifted).

Before You Go does not accept payment, free services, or any consideration in exchange for adding, removing, modifying, or omitting scam warnings. This includes:

• No sponsored content. No business — hotel, tour operator, restaurant, transport service — can pay to be featured or have warnings removed from their destination page.
• No affiliate commission on travel bookings. We do not earn revenue when readers book hotels, flights, tours, or insurance through any link on this site.
• No press-trip or comp travel. Editorial does not accept free travel, accommodation, tours, or restaurant meals from any party with a stake in our coverage.
• Display advertising (Google AdSense) is the site's revenue model. AdSense ad placement is determined entirely by Google's ad-serving systems and has no relationship to editorial decisions about which scams or destinations are covered.

If a conflict ever arises (a personal connection to a business that appears in our coverage, for instance), it will be disclosed inline on the affected destination page.

Errors are corrected promptly and visibly. Three correction types and how each is handled:

• Factual error. If a scam description, location reference, or how-to-avoid guidance is incorrect, the entry is updated and the destination page's "last updated" date is bumped. Significant factual corrections are noted in the changelog (section 12).
• Outdated entry. If a scam pattern is no longer active, the entry is downgraded or retired per section 6.
• Establishment-specific dispute. If a specific named business disputes their inclusion in a scam warning, the entry is held for re-review and a fresh source check is performed within 14 days. Where corroboration is sufficient, the entry remains. Where it is not, the entry is generalized (specific business name removed) or retired.

To report an error or outdated entry, use the report form at the bottom of any destination page or contact info@beforeyougotravels.com. The editorial team commits to acknowledging substantive correction requests within 7 days.

Category

One of the eight scam types defined in section 5.

Corroboration

Two or more independent sources from different source categories reporting substantially the same pattern.

Documented

Reported in the source catalogue with sufficient corroboration to be considered factual rather than anecdotal.

Frequency score

Integer 1–10 representing how often a scam is reported and how persistent the pattern is over time. See section 4.

Pending review

An entry that has been submitted but not yet corroborated to publishing standard. Held in the editorial queue (section 7); not displayed publicly.

Retired / rejected

An entry that has been removed from public view after failing the freshness check or following a successful dispute. Retained in the database for archival.

Source category

One of the eight source types defined in section 1.

Severity

low / medium / high, per the rubric in section 3.

Material changes to this methodology are logged below. Editorial entries (corrections, retirements, downgrades) on individual destination pages are tracked separately in each page's last-updated timestamp.

• 2026-04-28 — Methodology document published as a standalone reference, separate from the about page's overview.
• 2026-04 — Editorial review queue expanded to include named research agents (SENTINEL, VIPER, PHANTOM, WRAITH, CIPHER).
• 2026-03 — Frequency-score scale standardized to 1–10 across the entire database; legacy entries on a 1–100 scale were normalized.
• 2026-02 — 12-month freshness check formalized; retirement criteria tightened.