Writing activity 2 - A crime

Cartagena, one of the tourist places par excellence in Colombia, has become a
territory of constant scams where the main victims are foreigners. There are already
several reported cases of excessive costs for services or food on the beaches of the
Colombian Caribbean.

The Brazilian indicated that, upon arriving in Playa Blanca, six men distracted him to
take the cell phone out of the suitcase. "I didn't realize it until I got to a place on the
beach, because the suitcase was open and my phone wasn't there," were the words
he expressed to a local media outlet.

The scam occurred in Playa Blanca, in the capital of Bolívar, where a Brazilian tourist
was charged $4,400,000 for a chicken with fried plantains and a bottle of water under
a tent and, not happy with that, his cell phone was stolen.

However, the tourist says that he refused to pay this amount and they began to
intimidate him, for which he agreed to give them $120,000 and entered the code into
the dataphone. “I agreed to pay that amount immediately to get rid of them, thinking
that it would solve the situation. I don't know how the value charged was many times
higher”, apparently the dataphone was adulterated and showed that the payment
had not been processed due to “bad signal”, which is why he did the operation twice
more.

Upon being able to check his account, they actually charged him two payments of
$2,200,000 for which the crime of deception, fraud, intimidation and robbery was
added to this Brazilian citizen.

This is not the first scam that occurs in Cartagena and in various parts of the
Colombian Caribbean, and it is therefore important to verify the site where the
service is going to be purchased and request the cost of this in advance.

JENY XIOMARA MARIÑO SOSA