Letter To the Editor /Good People Versus Evil in Paradise

Letter To the Editor /Good People Versus Evil in Paradise

By Nick Foster

I love Key West; the people, the weather, the lifestyle, and just about everything about the place. Unfortunately, no place is immune from a few unsavory business people.

Our biggest industry, and source of income, is of course, the tourist industry. People come from all over the world to enjoy our slice of paradise. Most of our residents, merchants, and tourists are law abiding, honest, good people. Like many tourist cities, we are being overrun with the scourge of rip off cosmetics shops.

On Duval and Front Street there are currently nine cosmetics shops selling very expensive skin cream.They lure unsuspecting tourists in with free samples and then use high pressure, deceptive sales tactics while applying creams and lotions.They routinely ignore our city code that requires a written cost sheet to be filled out and signed before applying any product.

Their favorite target is a woman over 40 years of age, who looks relatively successful.  If the woman’s main language is not English — they are in high heaven. If the lady has had a few drinks, they may be especially pleased. Most tourists will not be able to come back to Key West to give testimony against the scammers. Regrettably one scammed tourist will tell everybody back home .

There are several common characteristics of these shops. All have bright, upscale store fronts, with first class equipment. This presents the aura of permanency and class. They have attractive, well dressed, and immaculately groomed employees.  Don’t judge a book by it’s cover. The object of a “CONfidence Man” is to get you to like and trust them.  The employee will be well spoken have a warm smile, and charming social graces.  All of these props are geared to your subconscious, you won’t fear the person who’s setting you up to take your money.

There are several other common scams unscrupulous tourist town businesses run:

 1. An employee will apply several types of skin lotion or make-up, telling the customer not to worry about the cost (inferring, but never saying that it is free), and then at the end of the treatment, telling them an extravagant amount.  If the customer protests, the employee may threaten to call the police. The customer doesn’t want to get in a jam in a strange city or foreign country, so they capitulate

2.  The employee will make a sale. If the total comes to an amount of $19.00, the employee will write the sale up as $1900, and the tourist  will not find out about it until they are back in Seattle, Germany, or France. Examine all credit card receipts carefully.

3.  Another method of stealing the tourists’ money is to take their credit card, and run it through the machine several times for the same purchase. Once again the tourist doesn’t know about the fraud until they are back at their home, and get their credit card bill.

To fight these rip off shops we must as a good citizens come together to inform our guests about the risk of being “taken.” We must insist any friend that’s ripped off, report the offense to the cit y code office. We need to help support our police and code office in their effort to strictly enforce local ordinances.

We need to work together to end this evil in Paradise!

Nick Foster is a retired police officer from Harrisburg,PA. He served as a “street cop” for 33 years and a probation officer for 8 years. If you would like to join the fight against rip off shops you can contact Nick at  [email protected]