The Stupids Arrive in London

When we woke up we were over England. They fed us a big breakfast right away, the same thing we had on the flight to Houston. It was 9:35am local time on a Tuesday morning and the airport wasn't very busy at all. We got through customs and immigration with no problem at all. Our bags arrived on time and intact. We had nothing to claim so we headed out of the terminal and down toward the tube stations. We needed to get tickets, and I needed cash to we stopped by the first ATM we saw.

Our first trouble was that I couldn't get enough cash out of the ATM at the airport. My rental agreement had said we needed to bring the remainder of the balance at the time of check-in (around £480). Unfortunately the ATM had a limit of £200 max. After arguing with the inanimate object for awhile I withdrew the smaller sum and decided to hit up the next machine I saw for the remainder. I had already alerted my bank as to my travel plans so I hadn't expected to be stymied by the local bank system. Luckily I had a wad of US cash in my wallet already so I exchanged most of it at the currency counter nearby. Now I had about £400, but still not quite enough.

Underground we stopped by a ticket booth and purchased two Oyster cards, supposedly good for one week of public transit, at the rate of £33 a piece. We popped through the turn-stiles and jumped on our first Tube ride on the Piccadilly line. The address on my information was 10 Sherwood which was supposedly just off of the Piccadilly Circus. We sat down and got comfortable and watched the scenery go by. I got out my journal and started taking notes. I wrote "..both looking forward to a shower, hope it's not a scam...". The prerecorded announcer lady's voice kept repeating that this was the line to "Cockfosters". We had a chuckle.

We got off the tube at Piccadilly Circus and were disappointed to not find a lift to the ground floor. We lugged our big bags up a couple flights of stairs and then up an escalator and through the turn-stiles. I found a row of ATMs and attempted to get more money. These all also refused to give me cash. Either they were out of money or there was something wrong with my card. Kat was tired and starting to get frustrated. I was getting nervous. What if I couldn't get all the cash I needed? Why do I need to bring so much cash anyway? I started to get a really bad feeling about the whole setup.

With limited cash in hand and our big bags, we climbed up into the daylight and set about trying to find our rental. Piccadilly Circus was packed with people, mostly tourists. I thought I had a rough idea of where to go, but immediately set off in the wrong direction. I asked a few people if they knew the way to 10 Sherwood and they looked at me confused and couldn't help me. Along the way we tried more ATMs, none of them worked. Kat tried to draw using her credit card, but it required a PIN. She didn't think she had a PIN setup, but guessed and tried anyway. That turned out to be a bad idea. It got flagged as suspicious activity and her card became blocked from further transactions. I finally got a message on one ATM that said "maximum daily amount reached". I guess there's a limit to how much cash you can draw in a day. Who knew?

We stopped in an American Express currency exchange and tourist information center to ask directions. The guy didn't know where 10 Sherwood was, but he directed me to the street. We got there and I started to recognize the area from my Google Maps street view search. There was the theatre showing Grease, and there was the pub at ground floor. There appeared to be apartments above the pub, but I couldn't find a way up anywhere. I expected to meet someone around here to show us the flat, but no one was there. I stopped in a restaurant to ask about number 10 and if there were any flats upstairs. The host was nice enough, but said that this was number 6 and that there was a University upstairs, but no flats. He even tried to call the number on my rental agreement, but he said it looked malformed. We tried guessing at it anyway and it was a wrong number.

Now alarm bells were going off in my head. This was definitely feeling like a scam. Kat was outside looking even more tired and frustrated. My plans for a relaxing honeymoon were imploding. I hadn't completely given up though. I headed outside and we continued our search for 10 Sherwood. We passed by the theatre and a backpacking hostel, who said their address was 12 Sherwood. We got to the next corner in front of a Caffe Nero, a coffee chain we've since seen everywhere, and I parked Kat on the curb, left her with the bags and said I'd go find the place and come back to get her. She was tired of lugging her baggage around so agreed.

I ran back to the theatre, which should have been 10 Sherwood and talked to the folks at the box office. When I explained the situation they were familiar with the scam. They told me that they get people in there all the time looking for flats, and although they were 10 Sherwood, there were no flats above them.

My heart sank. I looked at my documents and now things started to jump out at me as obviously fake. The spelling errors, the bad formatting, the bad grammar, the "googlemail.com" email address, as opposed to "gmail.com", the contact information that looked like a personal email address instead of a business. My mind flashed back to the poorly worded email exchanges, that they wanted to be paid with Western Union, always a red flag, and that I had insisted on PayPal, their lack of response when I emailed them questions about details and directions. I had fallen victim to a rental scam, someone who prides himself on being skeptical had been taken in by such an obvious con. I felt terrible. It would have been one thing if it were just me, I would have accepted the defeat and moved on, but now I had let down Kat as well, my new wife, and this was our honeymoon. I had had one major job during the wedding planning, plan the honeymoon, and now I had apparently screwed that up. Dejectedly, I walked back to the Nero Cafe, to tell Kat the bad news.