 A Jerusalem tour guide posted a sordid tale of scandal to a popular internet messaging board today sharing how his customers got royally ripped off purchasing some rather expensive tea in the popular Shuq Mahanehudah market in Jerusalem. It was such a brazen but intriguing scam that I thought it was worth sharing here to help future tourists avoid getting similarly jubed during their upcoming holidays in the Holy Land. The hapless tourist in question ended up paying the princely sum of 1000 shackles for a plastic bag full of herbal tea laced with sugar cubes, a popular beverage during the hot Middle Eastern summer, and seemingly a great memento from Jerusalem. The problem is that at today's dollar rate that thousand shackles works out to almost $270 which is far more than anybody should be paying for some dried rose petals. Here's a picture of the offending tea. While this may sound like a freak occurrence, dozens of online commenters rushed to confirm this grisly tale of financial shakedown stating that they had been similarly taken advantage of at the popular Jerusalem market. How long the Jerusalem dry tea racket has been operating isn't known, but ground zero of the seedy underworld in the holy city appears to be none other than the seemingly charming Shuq Mahanehudah better known for its fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, and not a few tourists have seemingly had their wallets lightened by falling prey to its charms. So here's the grisly breakdown of how the Jerusalem herbal tea racket apparently operates. Credit for this information goes to the tour guide who shared the post on social media, but as Israel's defamation law frankly sucks, I'm protecting both his identity as well as the offending shop which he mentioned. Scam move 1 The dried fruit tea in question did not have any price tag while the tea next to it had a deceptively low one. The psychological hack here is exploiting human's tendency to assume that dry tea salespeople aren't being total scam artists. If tea A cost $10 a kilo it's pretty reasonable to assume that the one next to it might cost around that, but certainly not 30 times more. The key lesson to learn here, when purchasing goods by weight at a Middle Eastern market you always need to know what the price per kilogram is, and if it's not written you need to ask. Scam move 2 The tour guide who posted this story recalled how the shop vendor in question was unusually generous in handing out samples of the tea for free, but this wasn't his generosity showing, this was rather him laying the next strand in his carefully crafted web of rose petaled dry tea decease. This is sleazy dried flower salesman tactic 101, and another ingenious act of psychological warfare. If a salesperson hands out large quantities of goods as samplers customers will automatically assume that it must therefore be a cheap product, but when the cash register rolls well let's just say they're in for a nasty surprise. Scam move 3 According to this eyewitness account the shady dried fruit salesman filled up an enormous plastic bag full of the product hoping to jack up the sale as much as possible. This put the tourists in the awkward position of having to ask the vendor repeatedly to remove some of the herbal tea. Again this is nothing less than a devastating act of psychological hackery plucked straight from the pages of shuck scams 101. No one wants to be the guy who has to ask the dried flower salesman to remove a few more petals to save a few more cents, except it wouldn't be cents. The golden pasta success here exploiting the awesome power of peer pressure to force people to buy more overpriced tea than they could drink in a lifetime. Fortunately this lured tale of Jerusalem deceit has a happy ending. After threatening to post the story on social media our tour guide hero succeeded in forcing a refund for his disgruntled customers. But of course not everybody is lucky enough to have a hero fighting their corner so instead you have me. The lessons learned here always ask about prices and the next time you're buying dried herbal tea in Jerusalem make sure it doesn't cost the equivalent weight in gold.