After covid-19 ridding Prague of almost all tourists for a number of months within the last 15 months, many businesses have disappeared. While many of them were run by good people trying to make a living legally, some of them were balancing on a blade between the legal and the illegal, often targeting tourists who were less likely to realise that they got robbed or less likely to take the shady business to Czech court. One of the biggest scams ran on tourists in pre-Covid Prague was unfairly overpriced money exchange in certain exchange offices, or even the exchange of foreign money for board game money by certain individuals in the streets. The number of the formerly mentioned stores has decreased significantly. There is now 130 less exchange offices in Prague. Some of these exchange offices exchanged the Euro for as little as 17 crowns ( the correct rate should hover around 25 crowns). The Czech national bank insists that the decrease in the number of these businesses is mainly caused by its inspection efforts, however, many argue that the contribution of this institution towards solving the exchange scam problem is debatable. While we can all be happy that these places are off of the face of Prague, many experts warn that people who run these scams are not easily deterred and will probably move their efforts to the internet.
