Play Police

On our way to the train station in Bucharest we had the fairly unpleasant experience of almost getting scammed. We were walking along when a bloke came up to Adam blabbing about something, Eva thought he was a cab driver and kept walking as that usually gets rid of them quickly enough but by now he had stepped in front of Adam and explained that he was a Ukrainian tourist who wanted directions to the Intercontinental Hotel, yeah right! As soon as Adam said 'Umm, yeah that way' and went to walk off two other heavies rocked up and blocked his way. By now Eva thought to stop and return, just as the two new guys were spinning a line something like 'We are Romanian police. This man is a very dangerous drug dealer from Ukraine, heroin, cocaine, you are speaking to him so we want your passport to see who you are' Not particularly believable at the best of times and the badge that got flashed which had written clearly on it Play Police didn't help but that didn't change the fact we were in some Bucharest suburb with three big thugs surrounding us. Now is probably the time to thank all those people out in Cyberspace and guidebook world for the advice we have read on scams like this (and thank ourselves for the research we have done). We started to explain that yes we will show them our passports at the nearest police station we could walk to and we would be more than happy to cooperate once there.
There followed a lot of yelling of 'identification please!' and other such things but we held our nerve (all the while waiting to get bashed by three Romanian thugs) and they eventually gave up.
The funniest part was when they attempted to keep up the ruse by shaking Adam's hand and thanking him for his cooperation, hilarious in hindsight but scary as at the time.