On Saturday afternoon, I went out and encountered something interesting. A foreigner was trying to scam money.
I was standing at the intersection waiting for someone when suddenly a passing car stopped beside me. The window on the passenger side rolled down, and a man who looked like a foreigner poked his head out, holding a map in one hand and waving at me with the other.
After I approached, he asked me if I could speak English. I said I could manage a little bit, so he asked me how to get to the Bank of China. I didn't know, and I was thinking whether another bank would do, but my English isn't fluent either. Before I could organize my thoughts to communicate with him, he took out a 10-yuan note from his wallet and asked me what its denomination was.
Can't foreigners read Arabic numerals? Anyway, I still told him, and then he showed me a 20-yuan note and asked me about it.
Afterwards, he asked if there are 100-yuan notes in Renminbi. I said yes. He asked what they look like and what color they are, and I said pink.
Next, he said, could you show him a 100-yuan note. Maybe he was a bit anxious in the middle, and he even blurted out half a sentence in Chinese, which seemed not unfamiliar to him.
At that time, I had 100-yuan notes in my wallet, but I felt his behavior was too strange, so I said, sorry, I can't. He was quite polite, said thank you, and then said he would continue looking for his "Bank of China" and drove away.
When I got home, I looked it up online, and it turned out this is an old scam. The earliest case I found was reported in 2003. I copied it below. Friends can tell their relatives and friends, especially enthusiastic elderly people, not to be deceived by foreigners.
http://www.wzdsb.com.cn/gb/content/2003-12/03/content_37050.htm
Foreigner Scams Money on the Street
December 3, 2003
City resident Miss Tao: On December 1, our factory paid salaries, so I asked driver Mr. Zhang to go to the bank to exchange some loose change. When he came out of the bank, a light yellow car stopped in front of him. There were three high-nosed blue-eyed people in the car. One of them got out and asked Mr. Zhang where the Bank of China was in very unstandardized Mandarin. Then he took out some 5-yuan and 10-yuan denomination Renminbi and asked him to identify them. Later, he also asked what 50-yuan and 100-yuan bills look like. Mr. Zhang enthusiastically opened his bag and took out the money he had just collected from the bank to teach them how to recognize it. At this time, another person inside the car was waving some foreign currency, as if trying to express something. When Mr. Zhang was distracted, the foreigner standing in front of Mr. Zhang quickly grabbed a stack of 50-yuan notes from his bag and pretended to be looking at them. After two or three minutes, Mr. Zhang took back his money, the foreigner got into the car, and said "thank you, bye-bye" before driving off. After Mr. Zhang returned to the factory, he discovered that the stack of paper money the foreigner had touched was missing 38 notes, totaling 1900 yuan.