Once after crossing the border from Laos to Thailand a Thai border official expected a bribe from us, citing some obviously made up tourist tax. I saw that they already stamped our passports and even though it was probably a stupid thing to do we just played dumb, slowly repeating the same thing over and over about how we're so confused, we thought there was no additional tax, we must have made a mistake, showing them the printout of the visa we had at the time, yada yada. Never were we confrontational, only slightly annoyingly "simple" I would say and it worked beautifully, after 15 minutes or so they gave us our passports and let us go. I've since applied that strategy in many other contexts, even in western countries.