“I can’t comment on individual cases that might be begging fraud, but I do know that it does not represent Roma as a whole,” said Carol Silverman, anthropology and folklore professor at the University of Oregon.
Not all Roma are deceitful, lying beggars. They are also deceitful, lying ‘craftsmen’ peddling wildly inferior home repair services.
They live in enclaves of expensive homes where everybody is a traveler or Roma or gypsy of what ever name you want to give to them.
The men travel around running home improvement scams doing all kinds of things to rip people off. The women don't work but take care of the homes and kids.
Some of them were in my dad's neighborhood years ago when he was alive, offering to resurface your driveway. My dad told them to take a hike. But they got his 80 year old neighbor down the block. Put some cheap black paint on his asphalt driveway and charged him $9,000. Probably cost them a $100 for the paint.
My wife and her mom were robbed on the highway between Madrid and the coast when they were in Spain at the end of a trip to Europe about 10 years ago. They were in a rental car and had stopped at a rest area for spell. Some beggars were harassing them so they left. Just a short ways down the road, one of their tires went flat (it had been cut with a knife). As my wife was in the trunk getting the spare and jack out to replace the tie, the thieves zoomed in on her and her mom and stole my wife's purse and camera in the front seat and took off. They reported it to the police in the next town but to no avail. The policia said that they were Romanian gypsies and were well-known robbers and scammers of tourists in the area. All they could do was to call the bank and cancel the only credit card they had. They had to turnaround and go back to Madrid to the American embassy to get new passports because they were in the purse. Luckily, her mom had some traveler's (no-pun intended) checks tuck away on her person and they had enough funds to finish the few days they had left and fly home.
But the gypsies also got her camera with 2 months of European travel photos on it.