its an interesting experience to read the travel blogs of foreigners who visit india. its like seeing my country through a different lens. reading them sometimes makes me realise things that my brain doesn’t notice because its obvious.

today i’m reading dave’s travel pages. i have no idea who he is. i asked comet (perplexity’s agentic browser) to find me blogs of foreigners about india from 2006 or before.

it started off with scam stories and i realised i had read this everywhere. i’m pretty sure any western foreigner that comes to the country goes through a bunch of scam ready training. which is what even indians travelling to other countries go through.

but having recently done a course on game thoery, its actually obvious why scams happen. if you gave someone who had no idea about scams, they could come up that sometihing of the sorts happens.

i’m defining scam as lying to someone for monetary benefit. why do people scam? because its in their incentive to.

every morally bad activity has a benefit and a cost. as rational humans, we’ll choose to do the wrong thing if its beneficial for us. in scams, specifically scamming tourists is a no brainer. why? because the costs are low. the locals are unionised. the solo traveller can rarely do anything even if he finds out he was scammed. (this is true about developing countries where law/police is easier. otherwise the costs will be high)

in game theory terms, scamming is most beneficial when you think that the person you’re scamming won’t suspect. this is when the tourist is a foreigner or someone from another state. even if you’re an indian, you only need to travel to another state once where you can be identified as an outsider for people to start scamming you.

what also reduces the cost when scamming foreigners in particular is the moral cost. we indians know that western foreginers are rich. that their currency is strong. so we moralise our actions by telling our brains that it won’t really do much harm to the foreigner.

tl;dr - people scam because the benefits outweigh the cost. the costs are low in a country where law implementation is weak. the moral costs are low when you’re scamming someone that is not from ‘your group’.