The story behind tabiji 旅路.

Who runs this.

Editor

Bernard Huang

Bernard founded Clearscope in 2016 — a content-research platform used by editorial teams at the New York Times, HubSpot, Shopify, and Adobe. He started tabiji.ai to apply the same research-first approach to a problem that had been bugging him for a decade: tourist-scam information lives scattered across police PDFs, foreign-language press, and decade-old Reddit threads. tabiji is the index that didn't exist.

He edits the safety series, runs the research pipeline, and signs every byline you see on a scam page.

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Editorial standards

Rebecca Leung

Rebecca sets the editorial bar for what a real travel recommendation looks like — would a careful traveler actually use this? Would she send her parents here? Her judgment is the reason a tabiji entry reads like a sharp friend wrote it, not an algorithm. She reviews the editorial standards every entry has to clear before it ships.

How an entry actually ships.

A scam moves from a stray traveler complaint to a published tabiji entry only when it clears three independent confirmations. Here's the pipeline, in short:

1. Step 01

   Pick up the signal

   The pattern surfaces on Reddit (r/Bangkok, r/Thailand, etc.), regional travel forums, or in reader emails. One source gives us a hypothesis. We don't ship hypotheses.

2. Step 02

   Confirm with the press

   Cross-reference against named publications. Two outlets is the minimum (Bangkok Post, Khaosod, The Nation, Le Parisien, Repubblica…); three or more for the books, where claims need to survive the longest re-verification cycle.

3. Step 03

   Confirm with the authorities

   Press alone isn't enough. We require an institutional record: a police arrest, an embassy advisory (US State Department, FCDO), or a tourism-authority warning (Tourist Police 1155 in Thailand, Carabinieri in Italy).

4. Step 04

   Editor review and ship

   Bernard reviews every entry before it ships. The published format includes the script, the red flags, the counter-phrase, the financial damage range, and the recovery path. Re-verified annually.

That's the short version. The long version — including a worked example with real Bangkok Post, Khaosod, and Tourist Police citations — lives at /methodology/.

Why this publisher exists.

A first-time visitor to the Pont des Arts in Paris meets a friendly stranger who claims she found a "lucky" gold ring at his feet and wants to gift it to him. By the end of the conversation, she'll have €30 in cash and the ring is brass.

A first-time visitor to Bangkok's Grand Palace is told by a polite local "the palace is closed for a royal ceremony today — let me get you a tuk-tuk to a special temple instead." Three hours later, that visitor has spent ฿18,000 on costume jewelry at a "tax-free wholesale" gem shop. The story has been on the Bangkok Post since 2014.

Tourist-scam information lives scattered across police PDFs, foreign-language press, and decade-old Reddit threads. That's the gap tabiji fills.

We pull from all of it — the official record, the local reporters who have been chasing the same touts for fifteen years, and the recent traveler reports that tell us which scripts are still working. Then we publish what survives the three-confirmation rule (see /methodology/) — every scam with the script, the red flags, the counter-phrase, and the recovery path.

1,168 scams across 123 countries, so far. All 24 of those countries with full Kindle atlases on Amazon are listed at /books/. The rest are free to read on the web at /scams/.

And what we don't.

And the opposite — what we won't do.

4,200+ pages and counting.

Everything below the books is free to read. Every scam, every pick, every itinerary — funded by the Kindle and paperback editions on Amazon, not by you.