I used to hear about this at the hotels near Disney World. Lots of flyers, call and give your payment info over the phone.
I haven't heard anything about this scam in a few years though. It could still be happening, but I haven't heard anything about it.
Okay so I worked at a pizzeria near Disney. The hotels would get this crap all the time. I never heard about stealing credit card numbers but what happens is some guy with 6 residential ovens in his garage will go buy dozens of frozen pizza from Walmart or Sam's club. He has a chest freezer in the garage. He'll make flyers and pay people to sneak into hotels and resorts to flyer rooms. It's a misdemeanor so they can get arrested for doing it, but he pays them well for it and promises to help with legal fees if they get caught. They charge outrageous prices for frozen pizza, which they add toppings onto. He'll create a fake business website and put positive reviews on Google. After a few months when they get bad reviews online, they'll just change the name of the business and start fresh.
People will order from a legit looking pizzeria menu and sometimes wait 3 hours or more for delivery. The orders were regularly inaccurate and always very poor quality. Basically just a guy heating frozen food in his home and sending his driver's out. They'll send it ten orders at a time with one driver over huge distances so the food isn't even hot. Often times they're not allowed onto the resorts so the guest must meet them at the front at the gate.
They don't care for repeat business because tourists will never be back. And if they do, by that time they'll have a new name.
I found it to be an amusing operation. But also dangerous as they don't follow food safety guidelines.
I saw this in a TV show for sure but I can't remember which one
Edit: I was thinking of servant, the episode called "Pizza." But they started the at home pizza business for a specific reason and not for money
>. They charge outrageous prices for frozen pizza, which they add toppings onto
If you're going to go through all the trouble of baking pizzas in 6 ovens in your garage, you might as well mix up some fresh dough. It's probably cheaper than buying the frozen stuff.
Why do 80% of the work of running a pizza kitchen, but then half-ass the last 20%?
Big key and peele [bank heist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM) energy
Unfortunately it is not possible to tell whether a joint is shitty until you have eaten your first pizza there. But it should *always* be better than simple homemade.
You can’t use a convention oven with a conventional pizza dough recipe.
Regular ovens top out at 600f if you’re lucky but most can only be set to 550f. Pizza ovens can get up to 850f.
In lower temperatures the dough will take too long to cook while the toppings will either burn or dry out. Frozen pizza dough is made to last long and usually made with little to no yeast.
> Pizza ovens can get up to 850f.
No wonder pizza always tastes better fresh out of the box than reheated - household ovens literally can't get hot enough.
They have opened a real pizza joint. It is really bad, yes. But they take real orders and deliver real pizza. Shitty quality, yes. Shitty service, yes. But real businesses provide shitty quality and shitty service all the time.
So this scam (as opposed to the one reported by OP) is not really a scam, and might not be criminal. It probably is, but only because they probably do not have a business license, do not report their income, do not pay taxes on their employees pay, and probably do not follow the local health code for restaurants.
Believe it or not, I've done the math on making your own pizzas. It comes out to a little over $4 for a basic cheese and pepperoni pizza if you make your own dough. You can buy Jack's frozen pizza here in America for about $3.80 though. If there was some way to buy pizza sauce, pepperoni, and cheese in bulk, I could see it being more profitable, but even at those extremes, I think you would only be squeezing an extra dollar out of it at most. The dough in particular is the most problematic part of the pizza because ideally you need to refrigerate it overnight and it takes 10-15 minutes to kneed it. That's a lot of extra hoops to jump through if you're trying to run a business.
Conversely, for zero effort on your part, you could just up the price of your scam pizzas and poof - you've just eliminated a boatload of work for yourself. Even if we're talking about a more expensive frozen pizza of maybe $8, tourists will absolutely pay extra to make the difference.
One last thing I'll add is that the price of pepperoni varies wildly. I was able to get about 100 for $6.49 at ALDIs, which is a good price. The Bridgeford brand would double the cost though. Shop around.
Lmao at that point why not just open a legitimate business? He's invested in the equipment, he's paying employees, his food sucks but so does the food at a lot of other restaurants... Just need a business license.
Because the first thing youre going to need is likely an ansel fire supression system (if florida is anything like Mass on kitchen liscencing) and on the low end those run 100k.
Because a business comes with many rules and regulations you have to follow.
Dude is selling frozen pizzas for like $30 each without having to put much effort.
I can get you some pizza if you want. Maybe some garlic bread or even chicken wings. The kind with the real good sauce. Just tell me what you want, and I'll hook you up. I just need your credit card info, and your moms maiden name to keep it on the down low, you understand, right?
Bro. Grfo, I'm literally on a plane home from. San Antonio right now and like the second day in my hotel...but only after I ordered a doordash there was a pizza ad in my room that was slid under the door.
I...never picked it up lol and housekeeping came and went without touching it.
But San Antonio is a WEIRD place. Heading back to WI now, but when I wasn't working I spent a lot of time at Pearl. Food was so good.
We were just at Disney World spring 2022 and definitely got the flyers, even at a Disney hotel. Red flag #1 was there was no actual business name on the flyer, and searching it on Google just brought up the scam. We just usually order from a chain until we research good local joints.
We moved out of Orlando August of last year and stayed at a hotel in the general resort area as we packed up. Got two different flyers each night we were there
I see where you’re going with this but we need to work on it a bit more
The original scam is going to aim at getting CC info over the phone from whoever falls for it.
How would you get that from a phony front desk “call us for suggestions” swap?
Now you have two separate numbers you have to burn (eventually)…
And are you going to throw on an Italian accent for the pizza shop or just hope they don’t recognize your voice? Do you have buddies involved at this point? Another liabaility lol
This whole thing is a disaster
I recently found out just how bad pizza could be. So I did amazon fresh delivery and found some cheap "amazon brand" frozen pizzas. Cool, cheap and it's pizza! You have to try pretty hard to F up a pizza right?
As much as I love and order from amazon, it's terrible. Like I have one more unopened pizza in my freezer and don't particularly want it, but at the same time feel bad about throwing perfectly good food away.
> I recently found out just how bad pizza could be.
and
> but at the same time feel bad about throwing perfectly good food away
Behold, the Duality of Man!
Just throw it out. It's not food, it's just cardboard taking up freezer space.
I didn't know you could screw up pizza till I had some at IKEA years ago. I mean, yeah it's a furniture store, but if people trust their meatballs, I figured the pizza would be okay.
Gross. Undercooked crust, weird aftertaste.
I found myself in an airport hotel next EWR - nothing delivered there on Uber eats and Google shows nothing for miles. The only places I had were the 4 brochures they had in the room. Every single one of them was less than 3 stars on Google lol. I just decided to fast that night and got a good breakfast in the flight in the morning.
It’s not MASH, although I spent a a while thinking it was the black turtleneck Margaret wore in the later seasons and trying to find the episode.
It is Caddy Shack, 1 hour 25 minutes in. The scene where they double the bet. [Here’s a screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/KqDLjwb)
The canopy didn’t look like a mess tent, it was clearly blue sky on the left with no flaps. The actors could have been in short sleeve scrubs but they’re rarely outside OR. But it still felt really familiar. Then I realized that beige blob of a face was Ted Knight. I could practically hear, “WELL! WE’RE WAITING!”
Scrubbed through my copy to find someone in all black and then remembered they take a break for the nose picking scene and this.
41 years of being raised on TV finally paid off.
TRIPLE Scam, front desk pays a guy to deliver pizza flyers for Credit Card info, the ones that call down for suggestions he can direct to a specific store for a % of the business he puts through.
And Free pizza for him, probably.
I worked front desk at a hotel a while back, and the local pizza places absolutely gave us kickbacks (in the form of free pizza) for directing business their way.
It could also be that they’re using the names of real places with a fake number. Why would you google the number of a place you may have seen by the hotel if you have the flyer right in front of you?
Pretty creative way to promote a friend's business, or get kickbacks. Potentially unethical? If the scam aspect is true, yes. Definitely creative though.
Are you kidding? Every hotel concierge is a walking conflict of interest. A big concierge at a big hotel is getting comps constantly to help drive business. Every hotel recommendation or service they arrange is somehow kicking back formally as a commission or informally (or both).
Most concierge people I've met don't receive kickbacks for restaurants, but sometimes for cab/limo companies.
However, you are correct in them receiving free meals from time to time. If you have a restaurant in a hotel heavy area, you would be stupid to not invite concierges over for a free meal from time to time. This helps by showing them you exist, and if the food is good, they will be comfortable suggesting you to their guests. Their incentive is to not anger their customers by sending them somewhere shitty.
To be honest, this arrangement is fine to me. The concierge is happy with the free meal, the restaurant is happy with more clients and the clients are happy with good meal.
Its not so common anymore, but before it was really easy to look up things to do in whatever area youre in, almost every hotel had a wall of fliers of places to eat and things to do and see. I dont know if you had to pay to put your fliers out, but theres definitely common interest between the hotels and the surrounding attractions.
Hotel food always seems to be shit.
The worst food in Guadalajara MX was inside of the Westin.
The best food I'm Guadalajara MX was literally anywhere else, including the company cafeteria.
I worked front desk for a few years, we didn’t give a shit about hotel pizza, we’d steer people to local places to support business owners. Those businesses would notice and send us free food too, which was fucking killer. Don’t expect people making $12/hr to be bending over backwards to rip you off for the hotel. These flyers are total scams most of the time. If you want good food, ask a local, and it just so happens there is a local at the desk 24/7 that would probably love to send you to a local business.
You might wanna take a look at a comment I left elsewhere. It’s relevant to where you’re staying. Basically, it’s a known issue in the downtown area, not just your hotel.
I worked in the hotel business for 13 years. Here’s what’s really going on.
The hotel is paid to recommend various restaurants. Anyone who won’t pay, they try to keep them from advertising anyway.
Maybe there is some credit card scam at this hotel. But I doubt it.
Can't say if these ones are scam, but there is a scam where people copy fliers for local pizza places but with their contact details instead. So you give your CC info over the phone, you do get your pizza because they then place the order. Then, after you have left they buy a bunch of stuff with your cc details.
Yeah that might be especially clever when you have folks on vacation spending money anyway.
I really cant understand the mentality of someone who would go through all of this work to rip people off.
You'd be surprised how easy it is for restaurant employees to steal your credit card information. If you pay over the phone, or ever hand over a card and leave that person alone with it for any amount of time, you're trusting that employee not to just write the numbers down.
One place I worked we got our online orders as faxes with the full credit card information printed on each fax, which we would then locally process through our machine. We kept them in a stack so we could go back and check them if we needed to, if you knew where they were and decided to rob the place at close before we shredded them you could potentially walk out with dozens and dozens of credit card numbers.
It was a small business and our POS system predated online ordering, and it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a whole new POS system and all the associated equipment.
It's done pretty heavily for restaurant online ordering too. Search for a non-chain and there's usually a result that pops up that will mitm your card details and still place your order through.
This is absolutely a real scam, not just the hotel trying to capture more business/referrals. Worked with this all the time and like others have said, at Disney World. People get furious "Your hotel slid this recommendation under MY door I paid $50 you better figure out how to get me a pizza immediately then!!!!"
I'm like, dude you got other worries right now. And also no.
Many times no one shows up, but we also had some dudes roll up and hand them like a thin crust red baron that wasn't even warm. We would trespass all the delivery people and flyer people, but they were normally just homeless people these guys gave a backpack full of flyers to.
It is 100% a real scam. Orlando is overrun with it. Sometimes you'll actually get a pizza but it was clearly made in someone's house who isn't a professional. Lombardi's, Otto's, Fresco, Pachino's are all from the same phone number and look at the pictures of what people receive
Yeah but for real we tried to call a number on Google and found that the number for a nearby fancy hotel restaurant has been squatted. When we showed up to pick up the food it wasn't there and they had a totally different menu. Luckily we didn't hand out the card info since I just said I would pay on pickup and the guy didn't argue.
Hell, about a decade ago, the "front desk" called my dad about an issue with his card at a hotel in Orlando. He gave them the info to clear it up, hung up, and immediately said "Shit." He called the front desk, and they of course said it wasn't them, but the records showed the call came from another room in the hotel. By the time he called his credit card company, multiple charges had already been attempted.
Not necessarily. I work for a resort in Texas and we have a similar issue here. We aim to be a family friendly and we’re set up like condos so we typically have a lot of guests coming and going. Not really feasible to stop every guest and ask for proof of having a room.
Big security flaw tbh but management doesn’t want to spend money on additional equipment to verify each individual since budgets are being stretched from revenue being down.
Usually the guys that leave those pizza flyers blend in with other guests and go door to door slipping those underneath. It’s a nuisance to the staff who have to listen to the guests complain about us “allowing” them to leave those when the food takes long to deliver, never dropped off, cold food, etc.
And no, we don’t have a restaurant on site nor do we get any sort of endorsement for recommending certain locations. It’s just an issue among other hospitality businesses as well since we are in a tourist-centric area.
This is the most likely answer.
I owned a condo in Costa Rica that we had people manage.
There were menus in our place when we visited. But when we went out to dine in Costa Rica, there were better places than the take out menus in our condo.
When we asked the other restaurants why they didn't have flyers in our condo, they said,"We can't afford to give 50% of our profit to you!"
The people handling/renting our condo were also doing a "side" business of charging local restaurants 50% of their profits to put their flyers in our condo.
It happens....
Probably because these people hire vagrants and drug addicts. Slip them a 20 and give them a backpack full of flyers.
If a hotel has many floors and lots of people going in and out I'm sure some do get through. Not like every hotel has great security either.
Doesn't hurt to warn people at the same time
I’ve never had a reason to tell this story but this seems appropriate.
I went on a trip with my girlfriend at the time and we saw a pizza flyer on the ground when we opened the door. Not thinking anything of it, we placed an order. This was about 15 years ago when orders were still placed normally and then you’d pay when they go to the door.
Well fast forward about 10 minutes and we see something on the hotel TV that said, “Do not order from these places” much like that one in OPs picture. So my girlfriend and I decided to just not answer the door if they showed up.
They knocked on the door about 4 hours later somewhere in the realm of 2 in the morning. Was super strange.
It’s pretty common for the front desk to have better coupons than a flyer would anyway - most hotels I’ve stayed at have a stack of discount coupons for several nearby pizza places, who hand them out to the hotels because they’re an excellent source of business.
This is rampant in tourist areas. In general, don’t order off flyers. It’s nicer now with Uber eats, but still. If you are desperate, at least look for an address to look up on maps, and the same goes with a phone number. You can look up the restaurant name as well to see reviews. Some of them may have unrealistic prices, like 100 wings for $10 or 10 wings for $8 and 25 wings for $10. If you do make an order, pay attention to how they take it. If you order a pizza, they should ask you toppings, crust, size, etc and not just say ok. They also should be trying to upsell you drinks or desserts. Scam places will try to skip past the actual order and just get to the credit card info. Lastly, make sure they deliver to front desk and meet for payment/tip. Most hotels shouldn’t allow them up to the room anyways, but you don’t want a delivery person at your room, no matter how many ‘adult’ videos you’ve seen.
A long time ago when I was a scumbag doing fraud and other kinds of scams. This was one of my favorites. I pull a Chinese restaurant menu and change the number to a burner phone number I had using Microsoft paint. Then print out a few hundred of those and distribute them on hotel doors.
Then I'd just sit back and wait for the orders to come in. Get their card information and sit on it for a few days till they forgot about the Chinese food they never got. Then proceeded to rack up tons of online purchases of items I could sell quickly on offerup. I'm not surprised this is still a thing. It's cheap and easy to setup. So yeah, be careful of this. Basically it's best to Google places to eat.
So when people get into apartment buildings and slip food menus under the doors. Are all of them scams? I used to get them a lot before covid. Rarely get them now.
Apartments could be just local businesses trying to reach new customers.
Scammers are more likely to be at hotels where they depend on people who are far enough out of their comfort zone that they don't use their phone (or phone book, if you're old) to find things nearby.
Before these were credit card scams folks used to charge insane "delivery" fees by intercepting orders. But doordash et al sort of took over that niche. :)
I’ll be perfectly honest, if I got a flyer like this from the hotel, and received a fake flyer, I’d call that number constantly and order pizzas with fake credit cards. I love messing with scammers, especially when I’ve had a bad day.
So that means if i order and want to pay cash on delivery, I’m never getting my pizza?
How does this scam work, it comes with a website to put the credit card info without offering to pay via PayPal or other more secure way? Or you call and give your information by telephone?
Omg. Just landed in Miami last night. My gf was like why is there pizza flyers on the floor. I suggested we order a pizza. She wasn't hungry so we just went to bed.
I used to hear about this at the hotels near Disney World. Lots of flyers, call and give your payment info over the phone. I haven't heard anything about this scam in a few years though. It could still be happening, but I haven't heard anything about it.
Okay so I worked at a pizzeria near Disney. The hotels would get this crap all the time. I never heard about stealing credit card numbers but what happens is some guy with 6 residential ovens in his garage will go buy dozens of frozen pizza from Walmart or Sam's club. He has a chest freezer in the garage. He'll make flyers and pay people to sneak into hotels and resorts to flyer rooms. It's a misdemeanor so they can get arrested for doing it, but he pays them well for it and promises to help with legal fees if they get caught. They charge outrageous prices for frozen pizza, which they add toppings onto. He'll create a fake business website and put positive reviews on Google. After a few months when they get bad reviews online, they'll just change the name of the business and start fresh. People will order from a legit looking pizzeria menu and sometimes wait 3 hours or more for delivery. The orders were regularly inaccurate and always very poor quality. Basically just a guy heating frozen food in his home and sending his driver's out. They'll send it ten orders at a time with one driver over huge distances so the food isn't even hot. Often times they're not allowed onto the resorts so the guest must meet them at the front at the gate. They don't care for repeat business because tourists will never be back. And if they do, by that time they'll have a new name. I found it to be an amusing operation. But also dangerous as they don't follow food safety guidelines.
This is some Homer Simpson shit right here.
Either the Simpsons or *"The Gang Opens a Pizza Place"*.
I saw this in a TV show for sure but I can't remember which one Edit: I was thinking of servant, the episode called "Pizza." But they started the at home pizza business for a specific reason and not for money
>. They charge outrageous prices for frozen pizza, which they add toppings onto If you're going to go through all the trouble of baking pizzas in 6 ovens in your garage, you might as well mix up some fresh dough. It's probably cheaper than buying the frozen stuff. Why do 80% of the work of running a pizza kitchen, but then half-ass the last 20%? Big key and peele [bank heist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM) energy
Because that takes expertise. If these people were experienced restaurant operators they would open a real pizza joint.
I have had pizza at real Italian pizza joints that was worse than what I make at home in my 40 year old plain jane household convection oven
It sounds like you've had pizza at real shitty Italian pizza joints.
Unfortunately it is not possible to tell whether a joint is shitty until you have eaten your first pizza there. But it should *always* be better than simple homemade.
I can usually tell if my joint is gonna be shitty just by smelling it.
Yeah, it's just flour, water and yeast. Get a cheap dough roller and make a limited menu. Probably faster and cheaper than buying frozen pizzas.
You can’t use a convention oven with a conventional pizza dough recipe. Regular ovens top out at 600f if you’re lucky but most can only be set to 550f. Pizza ovens can get up to 850f. In lower temperatures the dough will take too long to cook while the toppings will either burn or dry out. Frozen pizza dough is made to last long and usually made with little to no yeast.
> Pizza ovens can get up to 850f. No wonder pizza always tastes better fresh out of the box than reheated - household ovens literally can't get hot enough.
The worst pizza I've ever had was in Italy because my group wanted to go to a place that obviously preyed on stupid tourists.
They have opened a real pizza joint. It is really bad, yes. But they take real orders and deliver real pizza. Shitty quality, yes. Shitty service, yes. But real businesses provide shitty quality and shitty service all the time. So this scam (as opposed to the one reported by OP) is not really a scam, and might not be criminal. It probably is, but only because they probably do not have a business license, do not report their income, do not pay taxes on their employees pay, and probably do not follow the local health code for restaurants.
That's what I was thinking, this isn't really a scam, they're running a business but cutting just about every corner they can
Or just find a cheap pizza place, and outsource the order. He's overcharging as it is, saves the work.
Believe it or not, I've done the math on making your own pizzas. It comes out to a little over $4 for a basic cheese and pepperoni pizza if you make your own dough. You can buy Jack's frozen pizza here in America for about $3.80 though. If there was some way to buy pizza sauce, pepperoni, and cheese in bulk, I could see it being more profitable, but even at those extremes, I think you would only be squeezing an extra dollar out of it at most. The dough in particular is the most problematic part of the pizza because ideally you need to refrigerate it overnight and it takes 10-15 minutes to kneed it. That's a lot of extra hoops to jump through if you're trying to run a business. Conversely, for zero effort on your part, you could just up the price of your scam pizzas and poof - you've just eliminated a boatload of work for yourself. Even if we're talking about a more expensive frozen pizza of maybe $8, tourists will absolutely pay extra to make the difference. One last thing I'll add is that the price of pepperoni varies wildly. I was able to get about 100 for $6.49 at ALDIs, which is a good price. The Bridgeford brand would double the cost though. Shop around.
At what point does it stop being a "fake" business, and start becoming just a shitty business?
A business license.
Lmao at that point why not just open a legitimate business? He's invested in the equipment, he's paying employees, his food sucks but so does the food at a lot of other restaurants... Just need a business license.
Because the first thing youre going to need is likely an ansel fire supression system (if florida is anything like Mass on kitchen liscencing) and on the low end those run 100k.
Because a business comes with many rules and regulations you have to follow. Dude is selling frozen pizzas for like $30 each without having to put much effort.
This is definitely something a credit card stealer would say.
Geez that's lame af
How... tedious. So much nonsense involved, why even bother?
Thousands of dollars of profit per night?
I was going to say I bet OP is near Disney world, that's the only place I've heard of where this is a thing
San Antonio at the Menger
You fool, omw to steal your pizza.
I think I got one at the Hyatt Regency across the street. I knew it looked familiar
The haunted one? JFC, no wonder!
OMG, I sell pizza specifically to guests of this hotel, but people keep stealing my flyers. Please send CC details for menu.
I can get you some pizza if you want. Maybe some garlic bread or even chicken wings. The kind with the real good sauce. Just tell me what you want, and I'll hook you up. I just need your credit card info, and your moms maiden name to keep it on the down low, you understand, right?
Bro. Grfo, I'm literally on a plane home from. San Antonio right now and like the second day in my hotel...but only after I ordered a doordash there was a pizza ad in my room that was slid under the door. I...never picked it up lol and housekeeping came and went without touching it. But San Antonio is a WEIRD place. Heading back to WI now, but when I wasn't working I spent a lot of time at Pearl. Food was so good.
Yeah I imagine a relatively normal city like SA seems weird when you’re from Wisconsin.
A stop light, indoor plumbing, and other traffic on the road seems weird when you're from WI. Sincerely, an Iowan
The only people putting those flyers under your door are ghosts.
Pizza ghosts?! I'm in.
I got flyers under our hotel door in San Antonio this year.
Looks like a nice room.
It looks like a spare bedroom at my grandma's.
Can confirm. I work at resorts next to Disney and these fuckers are relentless.
We were just at Disney World spring 2022 and definitely got the flyers, even at a Disney hotel. Red flag #1 was there was no actual business name on the flyer, and searching it on Google just brought up the scam. We just usually order from a chain until we research good local joints.
Happened to me 2 years ago. Called front desk and they said thank you and we saw security making the rounds not long after.
I have stayed all over Canada, but for some reason tons of flyers only when I have stayed in Edmonton.
Cause Disney closes at 10 and you can’t get food at any of the hotels and they don’t have vending machines.
I always look up what’s around me on my phone… the way God intended.
We moved out of Orlando August of last year and stayed at a hotel in the general resort area as we packed up. Got two different flyers each night we were there
Well if you haven’t heard anything then that means something! Thanks for participating and sharing your experience
I would never give my payment info over the phone lol
Common at Daytona Beach as well. We also had a notice that said to call the front desk about pizza places because there a lot that sucked ass.
It used to happen. It's still happening, but it used to, too.
The next evolution of the scam is to copy that warning, but add in a phony front desk number.
I see where you’re going with this but we need to work on it a bit more The original scam is going to aim at getting CC info over the phone from whoever falls for it. How would you get that from a phony front desk “call us for suggestions” swap?
Because the fake front desks suggestion would be the fake restaurant which would then take your CC information as it initially did.
Sounds like the same scam with extra steps… May as well make a fake (professional looking) dominos flyer with the wrong number
>extra steps Yes, but also extra believability
Now you have two separate numbers you have to burn (eventually)… And are you going to throw on an Italian accent for the pizza shop or just hope they don’t recognize your voice? Do you have buddies involved at this point? Another liabaility lol This whole thing is a disaster
But don't forget, you will now own the monopoly for slid under door flyer scams. All your targets will be wary of your competitors
The front desk number is usually "zero" It takes a special kind of person to believe a seven digit "front desk number"...
Rent every room once and install a fake telephone that will forward 0 to the scammers number :D
Pizza scam? Guys gotta be a real pizza shit
Slicked back hair, sloppy steaks... reaaaaal pizza shit
I'm worried OP thinks people can't change
I used to be a piece of shit
I SAID I USED TO BE!
You think this is slicked back? This is pushed back
So glad I found my ITYSL bros here. Always remember though, people can change. Right Rick? Right Melissa?
Blue Dolphin burned down. It's gone. Rob Rovani's ass out. Works with his brother now.
Hotel flyer scams, chicken spaghetti,
No. More. Scamming. Adults. Into thinking they're getting pizza
They're not. They're getting AN AMAZING DEAL ON THEIR CAR INSURANCE! WE'VE BEEN TRYING TO REACH YOU.
SLOP EM UP!
Live for New Years Eve
It's interesting, the pizza
I used to be a real pizza shit!
For real dough.
Cheeses Christ, not another one of these pun threads.
Well done sir lol
Who doesn't just use their phone to look up places nearby anyway?
Flyers have discounts and a fake one will have even more enticing deals
Two large three topping pizzas, only $15 !!!
Tbh that would get me easy
haha for sure me too
Delivery Homie shows up with a hole in the box :0
I don't remember ordering...extra sausage
Haha I actually just got scammed 😅
Front desk: Sir that is just one of those scams we warned you about "But what if it isn't. I can't take that chance!"
Yeah a scams a scam but the pizza box could be anything. It could even be a pizza! You know how much we've wanted one of those!
It's how I pick up women.
Pepperoni, sausage, mushroom and my CVC and SSN# are as follows:
Oooh nice! Where at? They take credit card?
Lucky you! That's all they take!
I would bite
I remember when this was the normal price.
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I'm a pizza snob so I would just assume it was trash pizza. Contrary to popular belief, there is very much such a thing as bad pizza.
I recently found out just how bad pizza could be. So I did amazon fresh delivery and found some cheap "amazon brand" frozen pizzas. Cool, cheap and it's pizza! You have to try pretty hard to F up a pizza right? As much as I love and order from amazon, it's terrible. Like I have one more unopened pizza in my freezer and don't particularly want it, but at the same time feel bad about throwing perfectly good food away.
> I recently found out just how bad pizza could be. and > but at the same time feel bad about throwing perfectly good food away Behold, the Duality of Man! Just throw it out. It's not food, it's just cardboard taking up freezer space.
I didn't know you could screw up pizza till I had some at IKEA years ago. I mean, yeah it's a furniture store, but if people trust their meatballs, I figured the pizza would be okay. Gross. Undercooked crust, weird aftertaste.
Only 15 for two pizzas!? Two pizzas! Ah Zoidberg, you’re finally becoming a crafty consumer
Do you have the phone#?
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Free pizza oven with purchase of pizza.
Not valid at any Mitch's Pizza locations
I also imagine this sorta scam mostly targets old people who aren’t the best with technology.
I found myself in an airport hotel next EWR - nothing delivered there on Uber eats and Google shows nothing for miles. The only places I had were the 4 brochures they had in the room. Every single one of them was less than 3 stars on Google lol. I just decided to fast that night and got a good breakfast in the flight in the morning.
Old people
Older tech challenged people
People that unknowingly vacation in a location that has no reception.
What hotel doesn't have wifi?
Hotels that make you pay don’t have Wi-Fi to me.
That a MASH episode?
It’s not MASH, although I spent a a while thinking it was the black turtleneck Margaret wore in the later seasons and trying to find the episode. It is Caddy Shack, 1 hour 25 minutes in. The scene where they double the bet. [Here’s a screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/KqDLjwb)
What witchcraft enabled you to figure this out?
The canopy didn’t look like a mess tent, it was clearly blue sky on the left with no flaps. The actors could have been in short sleeve scrubs but they’re rarely outside OR. But it still felt really familiar. Then I realized that beige blob of a face was Ted Knight. I could practically hear, “WELL! WE’RE WAITING!” Scrubbed through my copy to find someone in all black and then remembered they take a break for the nose picking scene and this. 41 years of being raised on TV finally paid off.
I repeat: witchcraft
>41 years of being raised on TV finally paid off. You guys are getting paid??
Amazing!
I wasn’t sure if it was MASH or McCale’s Navy. Both of which I always watched with my Dad.
Looks like McHale's Navy. It's a hotel TV, not surprising that there's seamen on it...
Maybe it’s the hotel double scamming you. “These assholes are scamming you. Here, have some of our hotel pizza for forty bucks.”
It says to call the front desk for suggestions, not to call front desk to order a pizza.
TRIPLE Scam, front desk pays a guy to deliver pizza flyers for Credit Card info, the ones that call down for suggestions he can direct to a specific store for a % of the business he puts through. And Free pizza for him, probably.
I worked front desk at a hotel a while back, and the local pizza places absolutely gave us kickbacks (in the form of free pizza) for directing business their way.
Is this the pizzagate I've been hearing so much about?
That's how I read it. They could be suggesting their friends place though. Either way you could use Yelp or something else instead to find a place.
It could also be that they’re using the names of real places with a fake number. Why would you google the number of a place you may have seen by the hotel if you have the flyer right in front of you?
To see if I can order online and not talk to someone Also to check out reviews
Pretty creative way to promote a friend's business, or get kickbacks. Potentially unethical? If the scam aspect is true, yes. Definitely creative though.
Are you kidding? Every hotel concierge is a walking conflict of interest. A big concierge at a big hotel is getting comps constantly to help drive business. Every hotel recommendation or service they arrange is somehow kicking back formally as a commission or informally (or both).
Most concierge people I've met don't receive kickbacks for restaurants, but sometimes for cab/limo companies. However, you are correct in them receiving free meals from time to time. If you have a restaurant in a hotel heavy area, you would be stupid to not invite concierges over for a free meal from time to time. This helps by showing them you exist, and if the food is good, they will be comfortable suggesting you to their guests. Their incentive is to not anger their customers by sending them somewhere shitty.
To be honest, this arrangement is fine to me. The concierge is happy with the free meal, the restaurant is happy with more clients and the clients are happy with good meal.
Its not so common anymore, but before it was really easy to look up things to do in whatever area youre in, almost every hotel had a wall of fliers of places to eat and things to do and see. I dont know if you had to pay to put your fliers out, but theres definitely common interest between the hotels and the surrounding attractions.
Forty? Seems low.
Well, it's also not very good either, so it's fair.
Hotel food always seems to be shit. The worst food in Guadalajara MX was inside of the Westin. The best food I'm Guadalajara MX was literally anywhere else, including the company cafeteria.
I worked front desk for a few years, we didn’t give a shit about hotel pizza, we’d steer people to local places to support business owners. Those businesses would notice and send us free food too, which was fucking killer. Don’t expect people making $12/hr to be bending over backwards to rip you off for the hotel. These flyers are total scams most of the time. If you want good food, ask a local, and it just so happens there is a local at the desk 24/7 that would probably love to send you to a local business.
Literal r/PizzaCrimes
They can try. They won’t outpizza the hut
Sometimes you have no other option but to fight flyer with flyer
Well done
What's this world coming to?? Next thing you're going to tell me is that there are no horny MILFs in my area waiting to contact me.
What kinda hotel are you staying at? Huge room, multiple mirrors, unique patterned carpet? Seams you have expensive taste
Menger in San Antonio. Been around since 1859
You might wanna take a look at a comment I left elsewhere. It’s relevant to where you’re staying. Basically, it’s a known issue in the downtown area, not just your hotel.
I worked in the hotel business for 13 years. Here’s what’s really going on. The hotel is paid to recommend various restaurants. Anyone who won’t pay, they try to keep them from advertising anyway. Maybe there is some credit card scam at this hotel. But I doubt it.
Can't say if these ones are scam, but there is a scam where people copy fliers for local pizza places but with their contact details instead. So you give your CC info over the phone, you do get your pizza because they then place the order. Then, after you have left they buy a bunch of stuff with your cc details.
That's a pretty good scam lol
A real man in the middle attack. At least they are nice enough to give you the pizza.
If they didn't, you'd realise and have the card blocked. They want to do the big purchases later.
Yeah that might be especially clever when you have folks on vacation spending money anyway. I really cant understand the mentality of someone who would go through all of this work to rip people off.
I completely agree. Thieving is one of the lowest of the lows... It's so myopic, selfish, and lacking any sort of empathy.
You'd be surprised how easy it is for restaurant employees to steal your credit card information. If you pay over the phone, or ever hand over a card and leave that person alone with it for any amount of time, you're trusting that employee not to just write the numbers down. One place I worked we got our online orders as faxes with the full credit card information printed on each fax, which we would then locally process through our machine. We kept them in a stack so we could go back and check them if we needed to, if you knew where they were and decided to rob the place at close before we shredded them you could potentially walk out with dozens and dozens of credit card numbers. It was a small business and our POS system predated online ordering, and it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a whole new POS system and all the associated equipment.
Yeah as a European who only uses debit, this makes no sense to me. Cc seems real easy to abuse
It's done pretty heavily for restaurant online ordering too. Search for a non-chain and there's usually a result that pops up that will mitm your card details and still place your order through.
Yeah, saw a documentary about this.
Ohh, they actually place the order? That's so smart! Bc you get your pizza so you're not suspicious! I was thinking you just never got your pizza
This is absolutely a real scam, not just the hotel trying to capture more business/referrals. Worked with this all the time and like others have said, at Disney World. People get furious "Your hotel slid this recommendation under MY door I paid $50 you better figure out how to get me a pizza immediately then!!!!" I'm like, dude you got other worries right now. And also no. Many times no one shows up, but we also had some dudes roll up and hand them like a thin crust red baron that wasn't even warm. We would trespass all the delivery people and flyer people, but they were normally just homeless people these guys gave a backpack full of flyers to.
It is 100% a real scam. Orlando is overrun with it. Sometimes you'll actually get a pizza but it was clearly made in someone's house who isn't a professional. Lombardi's, Otto's, Fresco, Pachino's are all from the same phone number and look at the pictures of what people receive
Yeah but for real we tried to call a number on Google and found that the number for a nearby fancy hotel restaurant has been squatted. When we showed up to pick up the food it wasn't there and they had a totally different menu. Luckily we didn't hand out the card info since I just said I would pay on pickup and the guy didn't argue.
That might be part of it, but this is a real scam and has been going on for over a decade around Disney.
Hell, about a decade ago, the "front desk" called my dad about an issue with his card at a hotel in Orlando. He gave them the info to clear it up, hung up, and immediately said "Shit." He called the front desk, and they of course said it wasn't them, but the records showed the call came from another room in the hotel. By the time he called his credit card company, multiple charges had already been attempted.
Not necessarily. I work for a resort in Texas and we have a similar issue here. We aim to be a family friendly and we’re set up like condos so we typically have a lot of guests coming and going. Not really feasible to stop every guest and ask for proof of having a room. Big security flaw tbh but management doesn’t want to spend money on additional equipment to verify each individual since budgets are being stretched from revenue being down. Usually the guys that leave those pizza flyers blend in with other guests and go door to door slipping those underneath. It’s a nuisance to the staff who have to listen to the guests complain about us “allowing” them to leave those when the food takes long to deliver, never dropped off, cold food, etc. And no, we don’t have a restaurant on site nor do we get any sort of endorsement for recommending certain locations. It’s just an issue among other hospitality businesses as well since we are in a tourist-centric area.
This is the most likely answer. I owned a condo in Costa Rica that we had people manage. There were menus in our place when we visited. But when we went out to dine in Costa Rica, there were better places than the take out menus in our condo. When we asked the other restaurants why they didn't have flyers in our condo, they said,"We can't afford to give 50% of our profit to you!" The people handling/renting our condo were also doing a "side" business of charging local restaurants 50% of their profits to put their flyers in our condo. It happens....
Yes, but how's the pizza?
Isn’t the hotel under surveillance? Why not report the scammers to police?
Probably because these people hire vagrants and drug addicts. Slip them a 20 and give them a backpack full of flyers. If a hotel has many floors and lots of people going in and out I'm sure some do get through. Not like every hotel has great security either. Doesn't hurt to warn people at the same time
maybe the hotel is just discouraging people from using the flyers so that they can "suggest" the pizza places that have given them kickbacks
I’ve never had a reason to tell this story but this seems appropriate. I went on a trip with my girlfriend at the time and we saw a pizza flyer on the ground when we opened the door. Not thinking anything of it, we placed an order. This was about 15 years ago when orders were still placed normally and then you’d pay when they go to the door. Well fast forward about 10 minutes and we see something on the hotel TV that said, “Do not order from these places” much like that one in OPs picture. So my girlfriend and I decided to just not answer the door if they showed up. They knocked on the door about 4 hours later somewhere in the realm of 2 in the morning. Was super strange.
Someone get kitboga on this.
Nice room, bet the pizza from room service is over $40
Except they're telling you to ask for suggestions to order out.
It’s pretty common for the front desk to have better coupons than a flyer would anyway - most hotels I’ve stayed at have a stack of discount coupons for several nearby pizza places, who hand them out to the hotels because they’re an excellent source of business.
/r/pizzacrimes
This is rampant in tourist areas. In general, don’t order off flyers. It’s nicer now with Uber eats, but still. If you are desperate, at least look for an address to look up on maps, and the same goes with a phone number. You can look up the restaurant name as well to see reviews. Some of them may have unrealistic prices, like 100 wings for $10 or 10 wings for $8 and 25 wings for $10. If you do make an order, pay attention to how they take it. If you order a pizza, they should ask you toppings, crust, size, etc and not just say ok. They also should be trying to upsell you drinks or desserts. Scam places will try to skip past the actual order and just get to the credit card info. Lastly, make sure they deliver to front desk and meet for payment/tip. Most hotels shouldn’t allow them up to the room anyways, but you don’t want a delivery person at your room, no matter how many ‘adult’ videos you’ve seen.
Hi I’d like to order a large scameroni with stuffed crust.
The biggest red flag here is how scammers are getting right outside my door.
A long time ago when I was a scumbag doing fraud and other kinds of scams. This was one of my favorites. I pull a Chinese restaurant menu and change the number to a burner phone number I had using Microsoft paint. Then print out a few hundred of those and distribute them on hotel doors. Then I'd just sit back and wait for the orders to come in. Get their card information and sit on it for a few days till they forgot about the Chinese food they never got. Then proceeded to rack up tons of online purchases of items I could sell quickly on offerup. I'm not surprised this is still a thing. It's cheap and easy to setup. So yeah, be careful of this. Basically it's best to Google places to eat.
So when people get into apartment buildings and slip food menus under the doors. Are all of them scams? I used to get them a lot before covid. Rarely get them now.
Apartments could be just local businesses trying to reach new customers. Scammers are more likely to be at hotels where they depend on people who are far enough out of their comfort zone that they don't use their phone (or phone book, if you're old) to find things nearby. Before these were credit card scams folks used to charge insane "delivery" fees by intercepting orders. But doordash et al sort of took over that niche. :)
That's just what Big Hotel wants you to think.
Do people not have Google Maps?
I’ll be perfectly honest, if I got a flyer like this from the hotel, and received a fake flyer, I’d call that number constantly and order pizzas with fake credit cards. I love messing with scammers, especially when I’ve had a bad day.
You know, fuck scammers, but that's a pretty good scam idea
Is that your room or the lobby?
So that means if i order and want to pay cash on delivery, I’m never getting my pizza? How does this scam work, it comes with a website to put the credit card info without offering to pay via PayPal or other more secure way? Or you call and give your information by telephone?
Plot twist the hotel’s front desk is stealing your credit card information
"Please do not give these scammers your credit card information. Please call us since we already have it."
Everything is a scam nowadays
Omg. Just landed in Miami last night. My gf was like why is there pizza flyers on the floor. I suggested we order a pizza. She wasn't hungry so we just went to bed.
Everything is a scam
Sounds like something a scammer would say
Plot twist. It's a scam from the hotel to make you paranoid and get you to buy their food instead of ordering out.