Travel / Hard Candy - Krakow, Poland - reviews? [131]

This post not new? and Hard Candy is still scamming

beautiful? not from my standards but I am from Hollywood, CA. They were "students" travelling from Warsaw, convinced us to walk 5 minutes to a bar right near the square where we met them. Either way we had been meeting lots of people in our travels. We had been travelling for months and not once ran into a bad person until krakow.

It's good to continue to get the word out as this sort of thing shines poorly on your city when it's been going on for so long. The local police obviously don't give a hoot. That was the biggest shock when we realized they were likely in on the scam.

If you want to contact some local authorities and this happened to you here is some emails:
biuro@kit.krakow.pl, it@infokrakow.pl, krakow@amcham.com.pl, biuro@iph.krakow.pl, KrakowNIV@state.gov, KrakowAIRC@state.gov, Jacek.Majchrowski@um.krakow.pl, simszpitalna@infokrakow.pl,

Travel / Hard Candy - Krakow, Poland - reviews? [131]

Merged: Hard Candy bar SCAM in Krakow, Poland

(There's a Krakow Post article you can find on google that talks about this as well)

Avoid a bar right near the town center in Krakow called HARD CANDY it is a scam where they will charge you for way more drinks than you ordered or overprice the drinks you order. Local authorities and police seem to know but are either paid off or unconcerned about the safety of foreign tourists. I am avoiding the city of Krakow in my future travels so long as "businesses" like Hard Candy are able to openly scam tourists with little concern from the locals.

When I visited Hard Candy in Krakow with a few friends we were scammed when we ordered drinks. They had a menu that listed drinks for normal prices. When the bill came they overcharged us for drinks we didn't order and basically said it was our word against their's. The bill should have been about 30-40 euro, but they must have switched menus because the new bill was for 400 euro. When we tried to leave to tell the police, a bouncer came in and he forced us physically to sit down. The bouncer said he would hurt us if we didn't get the money so we were forced to go to an ATM and withdraw the money. He only let one of us out while another bouncer stayed at the club and made sure no one could leave. We felt like we were held hostage and the threat of violence made paying them the money seem better.

We later tried to explain what happened to the police station that is within 5 minutes walking from Hard Candy. The local police officer said that he had never heard of this scam and that there's nothing we could do. When we left the police office the officers we spoke to were actually laughing at us.

The next day I spoke to people at our hostel and they told us that we were lucky because people have been scammed there much worse. Sometimes the waitress will drug your drink only to wake up the next day with no wallet. But luckily we were in a group so it was safer.

There are plenty of websites that show local authorities you may contact to report Hard Candy. You can find them with a google search.

They obviously have done little so far, but if the word gets out then this will certainly help the city of Krakow's reputation.

Some things that have reportedly gone on besides the menu/overcharging drinks scam are: spiked drinks with drugs, prostitution, other drugs at this bar. I found a post that said that Hard Candy was a front for Russian Mafia and that the local police were paid off. Maybe we were lucky to have just lost 400 euro and not been physically hurt.