Scam Artists

It takes both balls and stupidity to do what these people do. They have perfected the art of the scam by creating completely different lives for themselves.

The idea of a hotel is simple:
1. You rent a room
2. You pay for that room
3. You leave that room.

It's really not difficult but scam artists always find a way to do steps one and three without ever doing step two. This is how the scam artist does it:

They walk into a hotel, normally at night, and ask how much the rooms are. They are told the price and say "Okay, I'll get a room." They have the person at the front desk create a reservation and when they go to swipe their card, it declines. They attempt to "call the bank," and someone talking extremely fast tells the guest to give the phone to the person at the front desk. They then ask the front desk person all types of meaningless questions and tell them to manually authorize the card. Once the card is manually authorized the theif takes their keys and goes up to their room satisfied.

The red flags to tell if you are facing a scam artist are:

1. They work at night. I've never dealt with  a daytime scam artist.
2. They are okay with the price of the room. I've had athletes, businessmen and other hotel owners ask me for a discount. No one ever just pays the regular rate.
3. They have a sob story that is vague like "I've had such an awful and horrible day. I really need this day to end so I'm gonna get a hotel room."
4. The card declines when you swipe it. There is no way that the card would decline if there was money in the bank.
5. They call the bank multiple times using the hotels phone number but it never goes through. Though when they call the bank using their own personal cell phone, the number dials normally.
6. The questions asked by the banker are useless.
7. A manual authorization is any succession of numbers. A manual authorization code could be 12345 and it will say "successfull."

I've seen plenty of people try this. I always tell them I can't do it. My coworker TT Y'all put it best:

"What are you manually authorizing? There ain't shit to authorize! No money equals no authorization equals no hotel room. Now take your ass up outta here"

This has worked only twice at my hotel. Once when a clueless/not giving a shit employee did it because she didn't know what else to do and another time that was so ridiculous it could've been on TV.

As I said before, I only worked at the hotel 2 days a week when I was in college. A lot would happen between my last shift one week and my first shift the next. I had a guy come up to me and he told me he was already staying at the hotel but needed another room for a friend. I went about the regular procedure of creating a reservation and going to swipe his card. It declined. I told him it declined and without providing me with another form of payment, he was not going to get another room.

Scammer: Oh, just force authorize it.
Working Girl: I don't do that.
Scammer: The girl did it earlier.

I called my friend/coworker, who worked the shift before mine, to see what was up. She confirmed it and said the manager told her it was okay.

I went ahead and did it and told him that this was very strange and never in the two years that I had worked there had I ever seen anyone force/manually authorize a credit card. I asked why that was necessary.

Scammer: Oh well I'm a music producer and this is a company card. The label puts a daily limit on the card. I spent alot earlier when I took my artists to the cannabis club. They bought so much stuff, all on the card. I must've hit my limit.

That damn sure didn't make sense to me, but who was I to go against the manager's word. It got to a point where through all the force/manual authorizations during the WEEKS that they stayed there, these people had four rooms. None of which were actually being paid for.

When the owner got hip to it the cops were called. There is surveillance footage of this group of "musicians and producers" gathering all of their shit and running out the back door.

The scene was ridiculous and fishy. I only ever force/manually authorized his card once. Any other time he tried I told him we were sold out and he couldn't get any more rooms. I was uncomfortable with it and quickly enough, so was the rest of the staff.

When a guest says they need to "call their bank" you should just say "I don't manually authorize anything so if the person on the phone asks me to do so I cannot and will not." They then get the idea that it's not going down. And with the information you have on them, you should probably call the cops.

Fool me once shame you, fool me twice...

TT Y'all: Motherfucker you better get the fuck outta here with that force authorizing shit.