>Quick story (knowing that "data" is not the plural of "anecdote"): A few years ago, we went on a group trip to Central/East Europe. In Budapest, right by Saint Steven's church, one of our group noticed that her passport was missing. (We'd just arrived in Budapest that day, and hadn't yet been to the hotel, where we could lock things up.) A few minutes, she was approached by a woman who said she'd found the passport and clearly wanted to paid for giving it back. We were pretty sure that the woman (or a confederate) had stolen it in the first place as part of an ongoing scam.

A friend who visited us a few years ago continued his travel on train via Budapest. He dozed off on the train and had his laptop stolen.

There's also a scam (or worse) happening on the gas stations. While you leave the car to relieve yourself, they nick your tire so it will gradually lose pressure within some 20 minutes. You stop to replace the tire, somewhere by the highway and they stop right behind you to, ahem, help you.

Hungary is a special case, perhaps only Poland and perhaps the Estonia/Lithuania/Letonia are in a similar position, in that they have been through wholesale robbery of whatever existed before (aka transition) and then became EU members, got the initial packet of subsidies and investment, which then petered out and left them with huge amassed debt, unemployment etc. So they got the taste of the carrot, and now IMF is wielding a stick and pretty much dictating, through their central bank and/or ECB. There's bound to be a significant percentage of people who've seen the robbery of their country take place, no heads rolling, so they follow the example on their own. So above, so below.

We got only the stick here, and the wholesale robbery on the top didn't stop for the last 25 years. Two weeks ago we had five days of serious wind, which covered the roads with blown snow, and about two dozen cars were snowed in just about 12km from here, and only 2-3km from the nearest village. They were eventually transported to safety, and retrieved their cars the next day. Most of the cars were looted, many of them left without wheels.