Big article in today’s Las Vegas Review Journal on bag theft at the McCarran airport carousels. No surprise. This isn’t new. In my book, I wrote:

It’s rare, nowadays, to find an airport that checks bag tags. Our policy is to get to the baggage claim area immediately. We don’t allow our suitcases to ride the carousel unattended, where they might “get legs.” In Las Vegas, a man was recently arrested for serial luggage theft. He stole only black bags, simply lifting them off the conveyor belt and walking out as if they were his. When challenged by a rightful owner, he’d apologize and say the bag looked just like his own. This unsophisticated system worked well for quite some time, until he walked off with a bag that belonged to an FBI agent. When the thief was arrested, his apartment was found to contain racks and racks of sorted clothes: men’s, women’s, and children’s. He’d been selling it to second-hand stores in $300 lots, the maximum cash-in-advance the stores would give him.

To prevent your luggage going intentionally or accidentally missing thanks to someone who thought “it looked just like mine,” decorate your bag with something that won’t fall off. I have green tennis racket wrap around the handle of my generic black roll-aboard. Who could mistake it for theirs?

And to explain the tape on our luggage, I also wrote this:

Now I’m going to reveal the raggedy edge of my latent obsessive-compulsive propensity. I actually run a strip of tape—something similar to duct tape—around the seam of my suitcase. Yes, I really do. I began doing it in order to keep condensation and rain from leaking in and staining my clothes, which had happened more than once on longhaul flights. But I soon realized the security value of the tape. Although it takes only a moment to stick on and I use the same strip over and over, it adheres strongly to the aluminum. It’s very much a deterrent to tampering and, for better or worse, makes the bag appear quite shabby. Look: I travel hundreds of thousands of miles every year. Some things I just know.

Excerpt from Travel Advisory: How to Avoid Thefts, Cons, and Street Scams
Chapter Three: Getting there—With all Your Marbles

11/5/09 Update: Why airport luggage thieves steal black bags
More about airport theft:
…¢Airport danger and the strategist thief
…¢Laptops lost in airports
…¢Thieves in Airports