Influencer Harry Poulton, who lives full-time in the Spanish holiday hotspot of Benidorm, said conmen are targeting tourists at the side of main roads and his issued a call to action
A British expat has warned that tourists are getting robbed in Benidorm.
Happily, there is one thing holidaymakers can do to avoid the same fate. Harry Poulton, known on TikTok as @harrytokky, claims that the robberies are going underreported and should be taken more seriously.
The influencer, who lives full-time in the Spanish holiday hotspot, said conmen are targeting tourists at the side of main roads.
“If you’re renting a car, if you’re driving to Spain on the motorways — do not pull over,” Harry said in a video.
“Not for someone that is on the side of the motorway with their hazards on, trying to flag you down. There are signposts in Spain at the moment, all the way from Barcelona up to Valencia and Alicante, saying ‘Be warned: highway robberies.’
Have you been targetted by highway robbers while on holiday? Email [email protected]
“People are being flagged down — there are normally two people in these cars. One will try to ask for help while the other distracts you. They then rob all of your valuables out of your car.
“This scam is happening all the time in Spain and in parts of France. But no one seems to be speaking about it. Has anything like this ever happened to you before? This is a warning. It is not worth it. Do not pull over.
“You might be doing a good favour, you might think you’re helping someone out. But next thing you know, you could have all of your valuables stolen.”
The British Embassy in Madrid has previously issued a similar warning, urging holidaymakers to “watch out for ruthless gangs of modern-day highway robbers who are preying on people driving foreign-registered vehicles and hire cars.”
In a two-year period, police in the Catalonia region of Spain dealt with 126 British victims of robbery on the AP-7 motorway between the French border and the Valencia region.
British consulates across mainland Spain said they receive regular reports of roadside robberies occurring along the coast between Barcelona and Alicante, across Andalucía in the south, and in the Madrid region. Consular staff estimate that one in 20 of all emergency passports issued last year due to theft were following motorway robberies.
Earlier this year, Moggy McIntyre told The Times how she and her husband Greg were victims of ‘highway pirates’. They stopped on a motorway on the outskirts of Barcelona after being flagged down by a driver who spoke to them in fast Spanish they couldn’t understand.
“After a few minutes, he gestured for us to wait and walked back to his car as if he was going to get something. Then he suddenly drove off,” Moggy explained.
“We were like, ‘What was that?’ It was so weird, because we couldn’t see anything wrong with the car. So we got back in, and only then did we realise that my handbag was gone.
“It had been in the footwell of the passenger seat, so the person I saw in the back of their car must have sneaked out and taken whatever they could. We didn’t see or hear a thing.
“Thank God I had picked up our phones and credit cards. But they got our passports — both my British and Australian ones — and also lots of inconvenient things like my Australian medical card, make-up, and glasses.”