The scammers themselves may be British citizens, or expats.
There, we used the word, expats, not foreigners. It’s quicker than saying immigrants or students or expats… and people from India and Britain often consider themselves “expats” instead of “immigrants.”
Why? Because they often get jobs that do not require them to be fluent in the local language? No, even when they learn the local language, they are still “expats.” I think it’s more because they might still need help from their consulate. There aren’t Irish consulates everywhere, we haven’t seen any in Cluj, but those from Britain and India often have expat communities and home government institutions to turn to.
Be aware that anyone from the British consulate, or any British government body, should have a .gov.uk email address and website. The phone number should be searchable online, and it should give you the same information as on a business card.
You might also know that any US educational institution ends with .edu, any UK one with .ac.uk, and any US military ends with .mil and US government with .gov. Many countries have a government designation followed by the country code, such as France (.gouv.fr) and India (.gov.in). And, many countries also have multipart endings for their academic institutions.
If you need to contact your embassy or consolate, the best information is on the official government websites. Most governments keep their websites up to date, even if many institutions in Cluj only have social media accounts.
If you meet a scammer, you might find it polite to take the card, but do use suspicious emails or other contact details on those cards (unless you’re doing that for your job, like you’re creating one of those funny videos where you pretend to believe a scammer and end up wasting the scammer’s time.)
In any case, the latest scam attempts have occured at the immigration center in Cluj (yes, that same one that is in the parking lot which gets freezing at winter.) Anyone who complains about immigration and bureaucracy in Portugal should move to Cluj. The large recent upsurge in immigration has been met with budget cuts.
Remember, the official websites will most likely have the latest contact information. Governments do not send out individuals to the immigration line or elsewhere, except in the movies.
(Maybe there are spies in immigration, there probably are spies for Britain, Russia, the USA, Israel, China, and even India in Cluj, but I doubt they’d give you a business card saying “Bond, James Bond.” Instead, I’d bet they’d pose as working as something boring, like accountants or IT professionals.)
(As Mark Twain should have told Eugene Ionesco, 90 percent of spies pretend to IT professionals, the other ten percent work in real estate or the finance industry.)