Selling $USD when we arrive

[Tomokoar]

Please be carefull, when you do deal with someone who you do not know.
Threre are possiblities to give you some not-so-good-money (pesos) even the rate is good.

 

[ElQueso]

How much is a small amount? $50-100 or more like $500-1000?

I'd say a couple hundred is ok. It's just a matter of feeling comfortable with what you're doing and if something bad should happen, what you wouldn't be hurt to part with.

I'm not saying anything is even likely to happen, it's just in case. Also, if you've traveled a lot and dealt with these kinds of situations before, you'll know better than me what you're comfortable with.

They probably won't give you their best rate with that amount, though. Most places would probably start $500 or over to give a better rate, $1000+ for their best.

 

[jimdepalermo]

Check back on this site before you leave, Huxley. This is Argentina, and thing change very fast here. Probably the blue market will still be strong in your autumn, but you never know. The situation could be very different then.

 

[KevinK]

HI
A good friend of long time is wanting to obtain up to 2000 us greens...
willing to take the average between the buy and the sell blue rate as posted on http://dolarblue.net/
as .she lives out of the city would have to arange to meet at my place in recoleta or mutually safe place..we can arrange by pm ...Would prefer only with someone of some standing in baexpat as i am... I will guarantee her pesos are good as i know her more the 7 years...and it is her savings...

pm me if interested

 

[Sockhopper]

El Queso,
I tremble at your advice and would opt for eating just 5 empanadas a day as food and drink on holiday rather than follow it. You're savvy. You live there. Maybe I'm a wimp. But even we repeat visitors experienced with travelling in many countries aren't as competent as you even if we have encountered enough memorable sharks in other countries outside the trade loop just like Argentina is.

Walk around Florida St. as a newcomer and have conversations about the same thing with one person after another and it will be impossible to not tell at least one of them how much you're carrying and want to sell because your job is to identify the one that's trustworthy! Snap judgments on whom you can in this thieves' paradise of a street (ditto Lavalle) is just too risky. As a local has advised on the TA forum, you may end up with a fabulous exchange rate that makes you want to throw kisses but you can be left with not enough to buy a caffe with the several hundred or a thousand pesos you thought you had just purchased.

It's way too much to expect a new visitor to distinguish counterfeit bills from real ones.

The ONLY time anyone in public has ever badgered me for money in BA was on my 5th trip - the first time I stopped for a caffe on Florida St where a waiter demanded I give him a good tip by banging on my table before he even set my coffee down or gave me the bill. That showed me exactly what cowers some new tourists in BA. It's an evil street but I needed to be there this one time in 5 years.

The person who's moving to Argentina in September really needs a recommendation of a cueva whom she/he can trust. I don't know if anyone here can do that for obvious reasons. It's a dilemma if no one can. Maybe someone could PM her with a trustworthy contact? This would be similar to providing a recommendation for a rental agency one can trust but I fully understand if this too isn't cool.

BA is so beautiful in so many ways. This situation for tourists, especially for new ones actually moving there, is heartbreaking. It's so out of the blue and yet throws people straight into it! It feels to me as if these financial controls want visitors to learn for themselves how to turn 'blue' fast. More likely is that legislators didn't think of us. We are peanuts too.

"If the Titanic sinks, it takes everyone with it, even those travelling in first class."
-Spoken today by Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo (Foreign Minister of Spain)

 

[ElQueso]

El Queso,
I tremble at your advice and would opt for eating just 5 empanadas a day as food and drink on holiday rather than follow it. You're savvy. You live there. Maybe I'm a wimp. But even we repeat visitors experienced with travelling in many countries aren't as competent as you even if we have encountered enough memorable sharks in other countries outside the trade loop just like Argentina is.

Heh. Well, we're going to have to disagree on the dangers and feelings about changing money here

I've been changing money on and off on Florida since I first came here 6 years ago. I did it to begin with because the first time I went to an official change place there was a guy nearby who caught me before I went in and offered me a better price than they were giving inside. The difference between the official rate and the blue rate in those days was not very big, but I didn't want to leave money laying on the table if I could help it.

You have a good point about counterfeit bills.

However, I have NEVER had a counterfeit bill from an arbolito down Florida, at least not that I noticed, nor that anyone else who I paid with money from one of these places noticed.

I have gotten a large number of them from taxis and even a couple from a CitiBank ATM.

I also think it's very easy to recognize about 95% of the counterfeit bills out there. In fact, that is one thing I'd be willing to do if someone bought me a cup of coffee or something - I could easily show them how to discover what a coutnerfeit looks like. At first glance they are usually pretty good, but one of the most common things is the watermark picture - held up to a light you can see that it looks like it was photocopied on one side, the other side looking better but still a little fuzzy. A good bill you can see the details of the engraving and it is identical from one side to the other (except obviously mirror-imaged). There are also vertical strips in the bill that are missing on some of them.

Anything that falls in that 5% hard to detect probably won't be noticed by many people anyway. I haven't seen very many clerks using the penlight or other detector methods on bills when I pay.

I don't agree on the dangers of going down Florida with a small amount of money to find a good price. It's a highly populated place, bright, open. The guys changing money there need to be at least reasonably honest to stay in business. Not that there aren't bad guys there of course.

But I've had friends robbed after leaving a legitimate change house/cueva. One of them had wired money and gone to retrieve it, tens of thousands of pesos, and was robbed after the thief was tipped off by an employee of the cueva that the guy was carrying a large sum of money.

Everything's a risk here.

I won't give out a recommendation on a cueva to anyone I don't personally know, and I hope that others are doing the same so that it isn't ruined for those of us who really depend on these places to offset the inflation that we've experienced while living here. If a lot of foreigners start showing up at these places, and they start feeling uncomfortable (particularly with the pressure from the government now), they are likely to stop accepting people like me who live here but are obviously foreigners.

I've had something like that happen previously. For example, a few years ago AFIP started cracking down on dollar exchanges. The cuevas raised their service fees from 1% to 2% and 3%. I started wondering why the cueva I went to told me they were going to charge me 6% the next time I wanted to make a transfer, and started asking for all kinds of documentation on the money was transferring. turned out one of the guys I recommended was transferring large amounts of money and they felt uncomfortable and this was their manner of kicking both he (they gave him the same treatment) and myself out of their particular exchange privileges.

That was a bit less than now if all of the sudden me, or other resident foreigners, suddenly flooded them with a bunch of other foreigners - many of whom may not even speak enough Spanish to communicate effectively with them.

The main cueva I use, I have to call the guy there, give him the name of the person I'm recommending, and they have to call pretty soon after I do to make arrangements. Sorry, but I need to save that for people I know and am sure of - and not too many of them, either.

I also wouldn't meet someone to change their money, who I did not know or who wasn't at least well-established on the board. Too many possibilities for trolls (no offense Tera) to take advantage of someone.

The OP asked a way to get access to the black market and I gave advice on what I consider to be a reasonable manner of doing so with few or no contacts in BA. I assume that anyone asking about black market access is aware of the possible dangers associated with illegal or semi-illegal activity and it's their choice to risk it.

 

[dennisr]

Counterfeit Pesos, use a LED UV flashlight if you are concerned. Can get them at pet stores. The AR peso uses fluorescent inks with many markers. With UV light, the inked markers and water marks are easy to detect.

http://www.amazon.com/LEDwholesaler...=1339760774&sr=8-2&keywords=led+uv+flashlight

 

[nikad]

They sell some pens that are fairly cheap to detect fake bills, both pesos and dollars.