When arriving in Peru, most tourists also need to buy a local SIM card with mobile internet service. We chose Claro, a reputable telecommunications company with a global reach. On 27.10. 2024, we bought 4 SIM cards (for local calls and 15Gb mobile internet service) in the center of Lima, at the Claro office in the Centro Historico district, Jirón de La Unión N° 449.
We paid 80 USD (20 USD per card) in cash for them, because according to the employee, there must be problems with card payments at the moment. At least 4 employees were working behind the counter at the same time. We were not given a receipt for the 80 USD payment, but unfortunately, as naive tourists, we did not ask for it ourselves.

After 2 weeks in Cusco, 3 cards stopped working when the internet volume exceeded 3Gb, and the fourth had a few hundred Mb left to use. We went to the Claro office in Cusco to find out what was going on, because the cards were supposed to be 15Gb.
There we learned to our very unpleasant surprise that our SIM cards were not in our names, but in the names of 4 Peruvians, possibly any citizen, and the cards were not 15Gb, but only 3Gb! And that the price we were charged was 5 times higher than their actual price!

We bought 3Gb cards for the last week of our trip at the Cusco office for 15 sol/pc. And we were charged 20 USD for the same service at the Lima office!
In short, there is a group of at least 4 fraudsters working in this Lima office - 3 young men and one young woman.

I also reported the incident to Claro Peru at the main office, but I have not received a response from them yet. I understand that since we did not request a receipt, we cannot unequivocally prove that the fraud occurred. But since we didn't research the prices of these service packages ourselves, we'll take the money that went into the scammers' pockets as cheap school fees for a good lesson.

No matter where you go to buy a local SIM card with mobile internet, don't repeat our mistakes. Do your homework beforehand.

Why did you buy 4 SIM cards? Did you have four different cellphones?

In my experience you need to provide a passport when buying sim Cards in South America. Were you asked to provide those? If not, that would be a tip off that something sketchy is happening. Also I believe it is illegal to not give you a receipt.

We traveled as a group of four!
Yes, we presented our passports, as I wrote, and it was also given the impression that our names were entered into the database. However, as it turned out at the Claro Cusco office, the sim cards had been issued to some locals, not us.