Funny scam

I encountered a funny scam here in Tenerife that seems to be pretty popular. As you might know, there are a lot of electronics stores here with pretty aggressive sales people. A new way of getting tourists to buy terribly overpriced stuff they don't need seem to go like this:

You are grabbed on the street by someone who wants to look at your digital camera and wants to know if "you have an infrared or regular memory card". You go, "huh? well, a regular one, I guess" and the person drags you into the store "just to show you the difference, no need to buy anything." After complimenting you on your excellent camera the person (or persons) hook it up to a tv, snaps a few pictures to your own memory card, and shows the images that looks really awful - murky and fuzzy. He then swaps to the "infrared card", repeats the process, and - lo and behold! - the images are bright and clear.

You might try to protest that the card just stores the image and can in no way affect how the image looks (assuming the card isn't faulty of course). This is put down with "well, this is technical stuff that you can't understand." Uh huh ...

And the bottom line? To sell you a common 512 Mb SDRam card for about $275 (If you actually consider the offer you're allowed to haggle to about half that price or maybe less, I didn't try it). Great deal, no? Such a card normally costs about $20, but then it isn't "infrared" of course. Not that these cards are either ...

I had a bit of fun with this one. Next time I'm going to tell the guy that I'm an engineer with Sandisk and ask him how this amazing technology actually works. Might be good for a laugh.