There are those horrifying moments when you come to realise that you’ve just been scammed and your credit card has been stolen. You turn around to find large guys lurking in the shadows and you don’t know what to do
This is how we felt after a credit card was scammed and stolen from us in Cape Town South Africa. This is a true account and the reason we’re posting it is not to give Cape Town South Africa a bad reputation but to give travellers have become complacent and let their guard down a wake up call because these things are very real and can happen and just an instant as they did to us.
We only arrived in Cape Town the day before after travelling for 3 days and almost 2000 kilometres across some of the most beautiful countryside we’ve seen on this journey so far. But the event that was about to unfold was going to leave a shocked and really unprepared.
We’ve spent the night out enjoying the sunset cruise around the harbour with a couple that we’re just met you know Hotel and asked us if we’d like to tag along it was a surreal evening gorgeous beautiful Majestic and then we headed off in our own direction for the rest of the night. We’ve had a good time we had a great breakfast the following morning and we had really relaxed into what South Africa and Cape Town had to offer.
The couple we were with on the boat gave us a heads up and some great tourist spots to go and check out so grabbing a map from reception and working out what we plan to do with our wand and Cape Town we set off map tucked under our arm handbags and cameras looking like the regular tourist.
We wandered off to an area where there were brightly coloured buildings and local homes. The area reminded me a lot of what we’ve seen in South America and Columbia it reminded me a lot of a little town called Guatape. With camera in hand we snapped off these few shots these would be the last happy moments for the rest of our trip in Cape Town.
Checking our map we knew it was only a short to kilometre walk to the next tourist attraction which happened to be an old castle that we wanted to check out.
So we set off. This was to be the last moment of happiness for the day. It seemed pretty straightforward is the road that we were walking on was in the city and was literally a straight line, so we couldn’t get lost.
As we crossed the road in front of what look like a park for buses we heard a whistle and a security guard calling out to us.
We were told that we couldn’t proceed much further up the road as all the concrete bunkers on the side of the road we’re going to be used to block off the road very soon and we would need to return to the shopping mall to purchase tickets to go to the castle it all sounded pretty legitimate and the security guard offered to guide us back to where we needed to be.
Walking through an underpass he pointed out a couple of ATM machines that apparently dispense tickets for the castle and suggested that we could use either of these two machines. So I got out my card and put it in the machine as he showed me which buttons to push. At this stage I’m starting to feel a little bit nervous, but part of me kept thinking he’s a security guard he’s looking out for me. The guy now standing behind us in the queue (waiting to use the machine) said yes these are the machines for dispensing tickets to the Castle so we all thought it was all pretty kosher. Yet this nagging feeling that something was wrong kept plaguing me I turn to Elena and said I just want to cancel the deal and she said just cancel and take your credit card. It was during this confusion that security guard was sleight of hand and had already cancelled and ejected my card. So when I went to cancel I was surprised when the card wasn’t ejected. My first thought was the machine has eaten my card and as I turned the security guard was now racing away faster than Usain Bolt. Share shop now took over as I realised I’ve just had my credit card stolen.
Honestly at this moment I just feel sick I feel humiliated that I allowed myself to get into a situation that could have turned really nasty in just one second.
Usain Bolt and his accomplice who happened to be the guy standing right behind us and now sprinting away and a crowd is forming suddenly the real security guys turn up I also notice the two guys he was standing further away have now disappeared.
As panic sets in we race to the nearest McDonalds which is just outside and hurriedly ask the manager of or you can use the internet we find the Wi-Fi here is really slow and getting online is proving to be difficult.
However once we do discover the banks website we realise there’s no way of stopping a credit card online and we need to make a phone call to Australia.
We walk across the square outside the McDonalds restaurant to a taxi that we can see just sitting on a rank and ask him to drive as fast as he can back to our hotel.
Neither Elena off or myself a talking to each other at this point we just want to get back to the hotel and make that phone call as fast as we can while we were in McDonald’s we could see cash transactions being taken from the credit card.
Within one hour we’ve lost three and a half thousand dollars but we finally managed to put a stop on the credit card.
For the rest of the day we never left a hotel room we just felt sick and humiliated. You glance out of the hotel window looking down on to the park across the road and wonder how many dishonest people are just walking around the city of Cape Town.
We stayed in for the rest of the day cancelled all our plans and just wanted to get out of the city we knew that tomorrow would be leaving and heading for the game parks
It was while we were sitting in the hotel room in the afternoon that we realised how close we came to getting mugged.
Had we not surrendered the credit card Elena had her handbag with her literally held every piece of financial information about ourselves all our credit cards her Australian driver’s licence and numerous other pieces of information that could have proved useful in the wrong hands. I too had pieces of information in my wallet that was with my cell phone. We had become very complacent and it made us realise that from here on in we need to be more diligent with the things that we were carrying with us on a day-to-day basis.
Since returning to Australia and allowing a couple of months to go by before writing this story I’ve had to replace my cell phone and had nothing to do with the event button changing my cell phone I’ve also changed my habit of keeping my credit cards and my phone together to try and avoid any future mishap where I might lose my digital life and my financial life as well as my belongings it’s a timely reminder for those of the travelling to be a little bit more cautious when in a country that is not your own.
One thing is for sure it certainly hasn’t ruined the privilege of travelling through South Africa it’s a gorgeous country it just took one idiot to ruin one day.
We did manage to get all of our money back from the bank which was good for us it’s certainly a story to remember about Cape Town.
If anyone reading this has experienced this horrible event or something similar would certainly like to hear about your stories so please feel free to comment
