This is a mixture of Romance scam,Friendship scam and Multi- scam!
Bayram Karaselek, also known as "Ali," is a Sultanahmet-based carpet merchant in Istanbul who has operated a series of sequentially rebranded shops including Elegance Rug Galery, Sedir Art Gallery, Ruby Art Gallery, Diana Collection, and Istanbul Mall, operating legally through KAV Hali Kilim Turizm Ticaret Limited Şirketi alongside co-owners Hakan Taştan and Mehmet Cengiz, and who faces extensive documented accusations of fraud spanning over a decade, including a Turkish criminal indictment requesting he be charged with aggravated fraud (nitelikli dolandırıcılık) after a Japanese tourist paid nearly 4.75 million yen for carpets sold as authentic Hereke silk that an expert determined were worth a tiny fraction of that price; his operation's alleged methods include using street touts near the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia to lure tourists into the shop, offering hospitality including tea reported by at least one victim to have been drugged, misrepresenting machine-made or foreign-origin carpets as handmade antiques, applying coercive pressure that left customers feeling physically unable to leave, and in some cases shipping inferior substitute goods after payment, with victims across multiple nationalities reporting total losses ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars. This summary was created by Claude.ai based entirely on publicly available data and may contain errors or inaccuracies. It should not be taken as verified fact.
This place is just scary. I was horrified by two salesman. One(around 30 year old, His initial is D.M. as I was told) leaded me to this shop from town using love psychology theory with high pressure and the other (around 50 year old, He used to live in Japan and spoke in Japanese) pushed me to purchase things in the shop using friendship scam with high pressure.
Lots of lies, lots of scams , planed team work with local kiosk clew , demanding physical relationship, mixture of everything! When making a payment, they changed what they say every 2 minutes. I don't know this comes from their Marketing culture...
Anyway this is from true experience . Don't go there especially if you are young girl and solo-traveller.I had this experience in 2015.
I found this shop still running in 2018.
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