Following in an unmarked car, the police took immediate interest in a dark gray minivan with foreign license plates. The stop-start driving was suspicious. So was the driver’s frantic texting on his cellphone.
When he finally drove up to the sludge-clogged terminal entrance of Tromso airport in Norway, he picked up two passengers.
“As soon as they started driving, we activated the blue lights,” Superintendent Lars Holtedahl said, recalling the February operation. “They were caught completely off guard.”
The crime? Working as an unlicensed northern lights tour guide.
The offense might seem minor to outsiders, but to the people of Tromso, a small Norwegian city above the Arctic Circle, such guides have become virtually Public Enemy No. 1.
Unregulated tour operators have created havoc in Tromso, which is perfectly perched on the fjords between snow-capped mountains to view the aurora borealis, the color-streaked light display over the North Pole.
Much of the year, Tromso is a quiet university town of about 80,000 residents. In recent years, the number of visitors has exploded, mostly because of social media. During high season, from September through April, tourists can outnumber locals three to one.
In February alone, more than 137,000 visitors passed through the recently expanded international terminal of the Tromso airport, according to the Norwegian airports company Avinor.
This unregulated industry, local officials say, has sown chaos on the streets and undercuts licensed tour operators, as well as the local tax base.
Most of the illegal operators are from China. So are rising numbers of tourists, some of whom are getting scammed. Many of the illegal guides arrive from outside Norway, working without proper permits and taking their profits with them.
“We don’t see an increase in income in the municipality, we only see the expenses,” said Helga Bardsdatter Kristiansen, the city’s first sustainability officer, pointing to a strain on the city’s roads and services. Nearly half of the tour operators in Tromso are illegitimate, she added.
This season, the police impounded about 10 vehicles a month and arrested more than a dozen people for illegally transporting tourists, deporting the illegal guides who were not Norwegian.
The driver arrested in February in the operation described by Superintendent Holtedahl was a Chinese national in his 40s and expelled. When he was pulled over, he lied and said he was transporting family, the police said. Messages on his phone revealed he had sold a five-day tour for 31,000 yuan, or more than $4,500.
“It’s a big industry,” Superintendent Holtedahl said. “There is a lot money being made, the honest way and the dishonest way.”
A typical tour starts at $115 per person and can be stop-and-start, with drivers checking aurora tracking apps, driving as far as the Finnish border, 100 miles away, chasing the lights.
The barrier to entry is low.
“You need to know where to go, and you need the car,” said Kurt Kolvereid Jacobsen, who is one of the heads of a special team, called the A-Crime unit, which was formed last year to focus on the northern lights industry.
In Tromso, the local A-Crime unit sets off at dusk, when buses clog up the streets, waiting to load tourists. Dressed in neon overalls, they search cars for illegal guides.
The illegal operators are often one step ahead.
Officials working with the A-Crime unit said they had uncovered a chat-group where illegal guides swapped tips to evade checks. Pretending their clients were family members was a common tactic.
On Red Note, the Chinese social media app, there are hundreds of posts complaining about scams. One user, a woman from Chengdu, in southern China, said the only thing she saw on her tour was the inside of a police station — after the illegal guide who picked her up was arrested.
“The driver became extremely agitated and demanded that I lie to the police: ‘Just say we are friends, otherwise this is an illegal operation and I will be penalized!’” she wrote, saying she had been questioned for four hours.
Another tourist, Tingting Wang, paid $1,400 so that she and her aging parents could see the northern lights. On their first night, clouds covered the sky. On the second night, the guide stood them up.
She returned to Shanghai and lied to her parents about getting a refund.
Tromso, she told us, “is very beautiful and like a fairy tale,” but “tourism is very chaotic.”
On the main road, tourists crowd for fries at what claims to be the world’s northernmost McDonalds or take selfies next to troll statues made famous by Disney’s “Frozen” franchise. There’s almost always a line outside the reindeer hot-dog stand.
The crush is an irritant for many locals, but especially for experienced aurora chasers, like Gunnar Hildonen.
Unregistered drivers are willing to accept a fraction of the $250 he charges for a seat on his 16-seater bus, he said.
“This season should be a celebration because it’s my 20th aurora,” he said after shoveling a path for his guests. “But everything went to hell.”
Murphy Zhao contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Jeffrey Gettleman from London.
