In something seemingly right out of the movie, “Taken,” my step-daughter’s friend and her girlfriend were the subject of some sort of scam yesterday in Paris!  You might remember my review of the move Taken here.

I found out about this late last night from my wife but before I speak about what happened to the girls, the movie plot and safety when traveling in Europe, I want to say this turned out ok – The girls lost guys in the train station and streets of Paris! Here is a clip of the movie Taken.

Now before I go into this I just want to say that I believe that people can travel safely and do so every day to many top destinations around the world. I don’t think Paris is any more dangerous than any other European city.

I think the difficulty comes in with young – inexperienced travelers. In the movie, Taken, the girls gave too much information to the guys they met outside of the airport. That later led to a gang abducting both girls after the bad guys found out the girls were there alone that evening.

Young women especially are vulnerable to this because they are trying to explore and meet people! It is almost counter intuitive to be wary when meeting seemingly nice guys and not giving out certain information like where they are from, what they are doing, where they are staying and so forth.

American women in the cinema are purported to be easy according to one travel site here.  Much like American men think that French girls are easy (I’ve never been to France so I don’t know about this).

So what happened? Lets call my step-daughter’s friend Amy. Amy and her girlfriend had traveled to Paris, France and were kicking back in a park. A guy nearby started up a conversation and the girls started talking to him. Before long another guy joined in the conversation and Amy became somewhat wary.

Soon the second guy pulled out a camera phone and took a picture of Amy. The girls demanded to know what was up and the first guy just brushed this off. The girls feeling weird about the encounter left for the train station to get back to their hotel. They noticed a new guy following them and soon saw the first guy!

Great martial arts weapons at great prices.

I do not have all of the details but the girls tried to evade the guys in the train station and took a couple of different trains… all the while seeing one or more of the guys. They finally got off near their hotel and lost the guys in the side streets somehow.

The girls tired to tell the hotel about the incident but there was a language barrier. The girls barricaded themselves in their hotel room and let their friend know what had happened via facebook. I heard this morning that the girls got out of the country safely and back to their host country after Amy contacted my step-daughter.

So what were the three guys going to try with the girls? Who knows… nothing good though. Did the girls do anything wrong? I don’t know because I just got an overview. What could the girls have done differently? Well the one thing occurs to me is to travel in large groups in foreign countries or with a tour. Girls alone in a strange country will always be the targets of all kinds of scams because the bad guys know they are probably away from their support network.

What did the girls do right? Amy eventually listened to her intuition and left the guys. She and her girl friend were on the lookout for the guys and when a third guy appeared – they knew this was serious. The girls took every evasive action they could think of (successfully). They tried to let the hotel know what had happened. My guess to why they did not call the police might be they did not have a good description of the guys and at that point – all the guys did was be weird.

All in all I applaud the Amy and her friend in figuring out something was up and getting the heck out of dodge!

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