Hey, con artists, you don't need a bag with a broken bottle or broken glasses anymore—all you need is to ask some of NYC's 50 million tourists for their credit cards and they'll give them to you. One man managed to pull a scam outside a midtown hotel where he asked tourists to "borrow" their credit cards.
According to the Post, Olivier Rey of Switzerland struck at the Sheraton Hotel & Towers, racking up tens of thousands of charges on credit cards from victims visiting from Minnesota, Washington D.C. and Switzerland. One victim spoke to the Post:
[Minnesota resident Gary] Koelling said Rey told him, “I just left my wallet in the cab. I don’t know how I’m going to get it back. My family is here. I have a reservation, and I just need to check in. Can you help me?”
“He seemed, at that moment, that he was at the beginning of a crisis,” Koelling said.
Rey allegedly told Koelling and his other marks that all he needed was their credit-card imprint to check in. He promised that he was getting a replacement charge card by the next day to take over the room charges, cops said.
Instead, he lived at the luxury Seventh Avenue hotel on his victims’ dime — to the tune of more than $41,000 in all — between Oct. 13 and Nov. 27, authorities said.
The convincing Rey was finally busted Nov. 30, after Koelling and the other victims got their credit-card bills and notified authorities, the sources said.
Rey now faces three counts of grand larceny and is being held on $10,000 bail. John Williams of D.C. said, "I was trying to be a good Samaritan, and this is what happened... I really do have faith in human beings. But there’s going to be a bad apple every now and then. I’ll probably think twice next time." FWIW, here's a Wikipedia list of confidence tricks.
