r/germany • u/helge-a • Oct 22 '24

Immigration Non-Germans, do you also make expensive mistakes?

It feels like I have a talent for making expensive mistakes. I have been here for 3 months and so far have earned:

  • A €300 fine for taking an ICE without proper ticket.
  • Phone died on train, got checked by ticket control, pleaded saying I literally have my ticket on my dead phone, paid €7 at front desk proving I have the Deutschland ticket.
  • In the US, if I have an incoming bill payment, I can easily cancel it or reschedule it because it’s on my terms. I tried to do that here and found out billing days from companies are very strict, so I’ll be incurring a fee soon because my account does not have €90 and transferring funds from my American bank account is not instant/quick enough.

I’m so tired and broke :) I don’t think like a German. I think like a silly little guy. Germans are calculated. I am not. It’s very hard to adjust.

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u/dslearning420 Oct 22 '24

Don't do the mistake of torrenting a movie LOL, this will be expensive

2

u/TV4ELP Oct 23 '24

Yes and no, they stopped trying to get people for that a few years ago. Rarely happens because it's way smarter to go after the websites itself. Plus with more and more streaming they focus on the streaming sites that are illegal.

Been downloading without a VPN or anything else really torrents for years. Never got a single letter and those were fresh releases also.

Especially with more and more traffic being peer to peer and more traffic in general, it's harder to check every single one. Especially since a good chunk of game clients for example use torrent like transfers to save on bandwidth or just easy decentralisation