Tourists pay attention to the scene around them, making them ripe marks for the picking.
When you research your destination, check on crime and security issues, too. Knowing what commonly happens and where gives you the edge. The goal is to be mentally prepared and to understand the local risks. You can then adapt your awareness level to the specific situation. If, for example, you know that sneak thieves prey on tourists watching street entertainment, you can enjoy the entertainment with a hand on your valuables or your backpack on your chest.
Most travel guidebooks include a section on crime and safety. The internet has a wealth of information, limited only by your search skills. Advice found on the internet is unregulated so the reliability of the source must be considered. The United States Department of State Bureau of Consular Affairs (travel.state.gov) posts annual reports on the conditions in every country a traveler might visit, and many we wouldn’t dream of visiting. These so-called Consular Information Sheets are politically flavorless; the U.S. government does not massage information in order to pander to advertisers or foreign ministries of tourism. The U.S. State Department is unbiased and tells it like it is, ruffled feathers be damned. Special updates are posted between annual reports whenever conditions change.
Consular Information Sheets are not exhaustive on the subject of crime, but they do cover numerous subjects of interest to a visitor. In addition to current crime trends, a typical report describes: the country and its major cities; its entry and exit requirements (including visas, departure taxes); safety and security issues (political and ethnic tensions, existence of anti-foreign sentiment, land mine dangers); medical facilities and health issues (vaccines, diseases, water quality); traffic safety and road conditions; aviation safety; railway safety; customs regulations (bringing electronic equipment in, antiquities out); currency regulations; child issues; criminal penalties; embassy locations; and more.
Reading the U.S. government’s report on France could have saved Cecily her anguish. “Thefts from cars stopped at red lights are common, particularly in the Nice-Antibes-Cannes area, and in Marseille. Car doors should be kept locked at all times while traveling to prevent incidents of ‘snatch and grab’ thefts. … Special caution is advised when entering and exiting the car, because that offers opportunity for purse-snatchings.”
The government reports trends, not singular events. The few specific techniques that make it into the Consular Information Sheets should be taken seriously.
Continues here.
Excerpt from Travel Advisory: How to Avoid Thefts, Cons, and Street Scams Chapter Two (part-b): Research Before You Go
At the Atlanta airport last week, a limo driver stood holding a sign marked “Bob Arno.” Next to him stood another driver holding a sign marked “Kevin Mitnick.” You remember Kevin Mitnick, the young hacker imprisoned for five years, released in early 2000. Remember the “Free Kevin” campaign? The guy who popularized the term “social engineering”? Kevin calls himself a non-profit hacker, since he hacked into computer systems for the fun and challenge, and gained nothing of significance.
We knew Kevin would be in Atlanta—we were all there to present at ASIS, the huge security industry conference. But Kevin was flying in straight from a job in Colombia, so we didn’t expect to arrive in sync.
First we social-engineered his driver to learn where Kevin would be staying. Same hotel as us. Then the chatty driver said that Kevin had been due in two hours ago. Huh. We left a note with the driver inviting Kevin to dinner later and left.
The airport parking attendant held us hostage. Our driver had given him the parking ticket, but he wouldn’t raise the barrier to let us pass. Something was wrong with his computer, he said. We waited. After five minutes, we requested our ticket be returned so we could go to one of the other booths, which were all empty. No car was behind us, either. The attendant refused. Bob got out of the car and demanded the ticket back, fed up with our driver’s polite style of dealing with this ticket moron. No luck. The man kept his head down in his glass booth, impervious. Neither logic nor threats worked, and it was twelve minutes before we were allowed to exit the airport parking.
We caught up with Kevin several hours later, and he told a hold-up tale that made thoughts of our little delay evaporate completely. U.S. Customs had detained him and questioned him about his many trips to Colombia.
“I have a girlfriend there,” Kevin said.
“Have you ever been arrested?”
“Yes.” Kevin couldn’t lie to federal agents.
“What for?”
“Hacking.”
“Were you hacking in Colombia?”
“Yes, but that’s my job. I was hacking for a company that hired me, to see if their system is secure.”
As Customs officers began examining Kevin’s luggage, his cell phone rang. It was his girlfriend in Bogota, hysterical. Meanwhile, an officer lifted Kevin’s laptop. Kevin wasn’t concerned about it. He routinely wipes his hard drive before crossing borders, shipping an external drive containing his data to his destination. Everyone in the field of information security knows the Department of Homeland Security’s new policy:
Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies…
“FedEx called,” the girlfriend said in her poor English, “they found cocaine in the hard drive!”
Kevin’s face went white and was instantly drenched in sweat. He wondered who could have put cocaine in his hard drive: his girlfriend? the packing/shipping storefront where he dropped it off? He assumed, understandably, that the hard drive seizure somehow prompted this Customs search.
“What are you doing here in Atlanta?” the Customs officer demanded.
“Speaking at the ASIS conference, moderating a panel on internet abuses. Here, I’ll show you.” He took the laptop and launched Firefox, intending to open the ASIS keynote web page. First, he hit “clear private data” and glanced at the officer, who instantly realized his own stupidity. The officer snatched back the computer.
HID card spoofer.
Other officers pulled suspicious items from Kevin’s bags. Out came another laptop, which they started up, thinking they’d found gold, unaware that they’d need a password and dongle to access the real guts of that machine. Then they pulled out a large, silvery, antistatic bag and extracted its weird contents.
“They thought they found the mother-lode,” Kevin told us, able to smile in retrospect. And we could imagine why, looking at the thing.
“What’s this, huh?” the agent smirked. Like, how are you going to explain this one away? We gottcha now!
“It’s an HID key spoofer,” Kevin explained to a blank face. “Like your ID card there. You just wave your card at the door to go through, right? I just need to get close to your card and press a little button here. Then I can go through, too. This thing becomes a copy of your card key.”
“Why do you have it?” the officer demands accusingly.
“Because I demonstrate it at security conferences like ASIS.”
Somehow, Kevin kept his cool throughout four hours of grilling. When he was finally allowed to use a phone, he called an FBI agent who was to be on the panel he’d be moderating, and the FBI agent cleared him.
Having lost so much time, Kevin declined our dinner invitation, since he needed to prepare for his presentation. After listening to his long tale, Bob and I headed out to dinner alone. We found the French American Brasserie—quite worth raving about. http://www.fabatlanta.com/ Although we both ordered moules marinière, hardly a test for a brasserie, we enjoyed the meal thoroughly, along with the decor, ambiance, and service.
Kevin had been red-flagged, of course. He found out later that Customs knew nothing of the cocaine in his hard drive. He also found out that there wasn’t any cocaine in his drive. There may have been a few grains on the outside of the package, but it came from Colombia, right? Still, the drive had to be ripped open to determine that it was drug-free, and it wasn’t clear whether or not the disk itself had been damaged.
So many airport ticket agents spend their work hours in terrible environments. In particular, I notice the noise level. Baggage belts and security scanners can be deafening, and they are constant. Screeching security door alarms and PA announcements add additional layers of racket.
I’m amazed at how little attention is paid to the sound of things, especially things that people have to work with day in and day out. Airports have a lot of these sounds. I guess it’s assumed that the target market passes through these irritations briefly and seldom, making them ignorable. But what about frequent flyers, like me, and airport employees?
Tired travelers in terminal misery.
Take the electric carts that carry late, handicapped, tired, or overburdened people to and from the gates. Some carts are silent, but in some airports, they beep with a piercing insistence whenever they are in use. Those poor drivers! Inter-terminal trains and trams: some, such as those at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, beep-beep-beep blastingly to signal the approach of the next tram. At the gates, jetway doors shriek shrilly when opened, or when they simply misbehave. And the sound I most dislike? TSA employees who pace the security line and shout orders like boot camp drill sergeants. I spend a lot of time in airports, so I have time to notice these things.
Alaska Airlines notices, too. The company provides custom earplugs to its flight attendants (though not free—they pay half). The earplugs are individually molded to their ears and muffle the engine roar while allowing them to hear voices. Wonderful. Yet, only half the airline attendants were wearing them, on the recent flights I took.
At the other extreme, Air Canada forced me to remove earplugs during takeoff and landing. “It’s a Canadian law,” the flight attendant said.
There’s a funny sign at the international terminal at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas: “No liquids or snow globes past security.”
I love the various scooters employees zip around on in Scandinavian airports. The police use Segways at O’Hare.
It was Cecily’s dream vacation: she and her family had rented an ancient stone farmhouse near St.-Paul-de-Vence on the French Riviera. Recently renovated to luxurious standards, it stood between an olive orchard and a lavender farm, strolling distance from the sea, and it came with a Renault.
For their first morning, coffee, baguette, and fresh farm butter had been delivered by the agent. Cecily feasted lightly on the terrace, then drove into Nice and shopped for groceries. So far, excellent. She loaded the Renault feeling spiffy, pleased with her success, and rather… je ne sais quois. Perhaps rather French.
Just as Cecily got into the car a nice-looking man approached and asked her something: where could he buy a newspaper? where was a petrol station? Cecily’s French had rusted since high school, but she struggled to understand.
“Don’t worry,” the man said in English. “I am not going to steal from you.”
What? Cecily swiveled in her seat just in time to see another man, a partner, dash off with her purse which, sadly, still contained her entire family’s passports and return air tickets. The nice-looking man at her window was gone.
The ticket machines confuse a steady stream of travelers.
Rome, Italy—Termini Station serves up buses, trains, and the subway. Four long rows of ticket machines busily dispense tickets and confound travelers. Traffic is brisk. Meanwhile, thieves and con artists loiter, watching. Bob and I loitered, too.
An unkempt man pushed in close to a family trying to figure out the machine. The man kept offering advice, though he clearly hadn’t a clue about the machine. The family repeatedly waved him away. After a while he moved to another group at a machine halfway down the row, where he was equally unwelcome.
A pair of cops sauntered past and Bob had a conversation with them. Berlusconi’s drastic anti-immigrant program has not made a dent in crime, these and other cops told us. Bob strolled with the patrolling police while I took up a position next to the new plexiglass wall that protects ticket-buyers at agent windows from pickpockets and bag thieves. No longer do mobs press against passengers who must set down bags and fumble with wallets while buying tickets.
A new glass enclosure keeps the crowds away from travelers as they buy their tickets. Still, station police get about 50 reports of theft per day.
Unattended luggage caught my eye. A large suitcase topped with a sleeping bag stood several yards away from the ticket machines. Who could have turned his back on his belongings in such a place?
Bob returned with the police, who removed the troublesome wastrel from the midst of the ticket machine crowd. I could be wrong, but it appeared they photographed him first with a mobile phone camera.
Bob and I scrutinized the messy line of machine-users, trying to guess who the unwatched bag belonged to. Few by few, people left the machines and the bag remained. Eventually, only one young couple remained, the rest of the crowd being freshly arrived and unattached to the lonely luggage. But this couple never glanced toward the baggage at all. Either it wasn’t theirs, or they were part of a sting, as demonstratively ignoring their stuff as I had years before in a casino coin-pail operation.
The suitcase at left was unattended for at least 15 minutes.
As the minutes went by, Bob’s and my amazement grew. We discussed the possibilities: police baiting bag thieves; a daring drug deal in which the suitcase contained cash or contraband; a frazzled traveler who’d shortly return for the forgotten thing, panting and train long gone. We kept our eyes on the bag.
A man came up to us and began a long tale in Italian. He was 60 or so, and looked like a grizzled businessman dressed in city-casual: a button-down shirt tucked into belted gabardines. He might have worn a sport coat, I’m not sure. We glanced at him and let him ramble as we kept watch on the suitcase, wondering what his scam was. His tone was moderate, a little confidential, a little urgent. He asked a question and from his baggy pants pocket pulled out an enormous wad of euros, bound by a thick rubber band. He switched to mostly unintelligible English, something about a bank, and persevered.
The suitcase was gone.
How? We’d been determined to see its resolution and barely looked at the interloper who’d accosted us. Had he come just to distract us? He’d certainly succeeded by flashing his money roll. We left him and rushed to the ticket machines, not twenty feet away, hoping to catch a glimpse of the bag, but it was gone without a trace.
Porcini, at right, make my day.
We were angry and disappointed in ourselves. But not to despair: this was a good excuse for a consolation dinner. By accident, we found Ristorante Pizzeria da Francesco, and they had fresh porcini! Porcini will always perk me up, and Francesco served them the ultimate way: on thin, crisp pizza with a bit of mozzarella. No wonder the place was jammed with locals—well, anyway, the waiters didn’t kiss me.
Part of the police contingent present at Bob's lectures.
Panama City, Panama—Bob asked one of our Panama police escorts what serious crimes against tourists had occurred recently. The officer stunned us with a horrific story of some visitors who had rented a car and driven to a lodge in a rainforest. They were ambushed somewhere out in the countryside and robbed of everything.
With disgust all over his face, the officer went on: the perpetrators, it was later discovered, were police officers. They had been tipped off by someone at the airport or car rental agency.
Two days later, we saw an English-language Panama paper:
…members of the Tourism Police who arrested three men who are suspected of being part of a gang that robs tourists allegedly smashed the suspects’ fingers with a hammer, beat them with golf clubs and forced their heads into bags full of pepper gas in an attempt to make them reveal what happened to the proceeds of a string of robberies. According to a report, the crime was allegedly aggravated by the cops’ motive to make the suspects reveal where the money was so that they could take it for themselves. —The Panama News
It was pitch dark in Casco Antigua. It's amazing what a good digital camera can do.
We returned to Panama half a year later and, though it was already 9 p.m., made straight for the old, dilapidated, historic section of Panama City. We walked the dark and dangerous streets with our cameras dangling and very soon approached a few people loitering on a corner to ask for Angel or Jaime, the former thieves.
The loiterers whistled over an English-speaker: amazingly, it was Angel’s mother. She and one of the men, a private security guard, walked us to a gangster hangout, and there we spoke with about a dozen young thugs, Angel’s mother translating.
Again, this was a dark night. Taken with a flash and lightened in Photoshop.
The boys sized us up quickly and automatically, and we did the same. I looked at their smooth skin, fake-tough faces, and posturing, and couldn’t prevent wistful thoughts of their youth and potential, or lack of potential. Bob did some goofy steals on the guys. One of them brandished a cellphone and fancy money-clip full of cash, claiming he’d just lifted them. Despite all their braggadocio, the gangsters clearly wanted a little old-fashioned fun. Like the thieves we speak to the world over, they blossom when spoken to with simple respect.
Eventually, a stoned-looking Angel arrived, with bloodshot eyes, no job, no vocation, and apparently still one of the gang. We wouldn’t be surprised if he was back to thieving. Jaime, on the other hand, was working with the Department of Tourism, we were told.
The gangsters got a kick out of Bob's attention. They probably behaved themselves because of Angel's mother's deference to us.
A pair of cops arrived on the scene and chastised us for clowning around with these criminals. We were not allowed to be in this area at this hour. There had been a murder right here five days ago. The cops pointed us out of the neighborhood and gave us a virtual kick in the butt along with the virtual spanking. Before we left the district, Angel’s mother brought us into her friend’s house. Angel followed and asked us for a gift of cash, which we gave him.
As far as gangsters go, these don't look too threatening. But what do all their hand gestures mean?
Angel’s mother talks to Bob while Angel and Jaime play. Notice Jaime’s prop.
Panama City, Panama—Angel lives in the school building with his mother and assorted siblings. Aha! So that’s who’d done all the neat laundry hanging inside the school gate. Bob asked Angel to fetch his mother who, to our surprise, was not only willing to speak with a camera in her face, but did so in English. She used to work in a casino, which is how she learned English.
Angel was always different from his brothers, his mother explained. Eventually he stopped going to school, stayed out late, and didn’t listen to his mother. He’s changed a lot since he’s been in this program, she said. Now he’s good, he’s home every night, goes to bed early, and gets up early.
With reluctance, Angel’s mother allowed me into her home. A television blared among the mattresses in the empty bedroom.
The audacious Bob Arno asked to see where she lives and where Angel sleeps. There’s no end to Bob’s impudence. He has no humility.
What thoughts of hope played in Angel’s mother’s mind as she led us to her “apartment?” Who are these impertinent snoops, she must have wondered, poking around here two days in a row, sometimes escorted by police chiefs, bodyguards, and interpreters? Foreign dignitaries? Potential benefactors? Deus ex machinas?
She shuffled to a wooden door and ordered Angel to get rid of the dogs yapping in front of a knee-high board. “I’m sorry. Be careful,” she said, pointing to the scrappy barrier.
I don’t know who felt worse about this intrusion, Angel’s mother, or I.
“My wife will film it,” Bob said, manipulating me forward. I was mortified, ashamed by my violation of the poor woman’s privacy. But like the woman, I wasn’t given a choice, and it would have been more embarrassing to refuse. I couldn’t think how to stop on a dime after I’d been pushed down a slippery slope. I shouldered the offensive video camera and, with one eye on the viewfinder and the other watching my feet, stepped over the dogs at the door and the scrap of wood meant to keep them out of the room.
There was also a chest of drawers in the room, with all its drawers open and spilling clothes.
Angel’s mom showed me around, pointing out her possessions. She kept a running dialog, but I heard none of it, due to a blaring television, yapping dogs, and my extreme discomfort with this assignment.
Handicapped, double-jointed, or injured? A dog in Casco Antigua.
Properties in San Filipe, a World Heritage Site, are being purchased and restored by foreigners.
Panama City, Panama—Bob and I had come to Panama as guests of the national and local police departments and the Panama National Hotel Association. The Central American country aspires to a boom in tourism and recognizes the need to curb street crime in its cities, tourist areas, and especially San Filipe, aka Casco Antigua, Panama City’s old town and a World Heritage Site.
Panama Policia Nacional
Bringing in Bob Arno as a consultant to the tourism industry and trainer for police departments and security divisions was a major organizational feat involving numerous government agencies.
Panama Policia Nacional
(The coup is entirely credited to the gentle, eloquent, and now retired Carlos Sanad of the Office of the Attorney General in Panama.) Bob and I were treated like dignitaries during our stay in Panama, hosted at the country’s newest, grandest resorts, provided with several translators, and always shadowed by bodyguards. We were transported in police vans but, in order to conduct our simultaneous research, often felt the necessity of ditching the navy-suited men talking into their wrists.
Guests of the government require ever-present bodyguards.
When we interviewed Angel and his pal Jaime, we left all badge-bearers outside. What would the gangsters tell us with police present? Perhaps that is why they felt free to demonstrate their pickpocketing techniques and speak of their criminal exploits. That, and Bob’s easy, simpatico demeanor. They showed their choreography with pride.
Jaime shows Bob how he extracts a wallet.
Bob was unimpressed with the boys’ talent. I was a bit more forgiving: presumably, they were rusty, being officially out of the business. Not to mention under great pressure with an audience of two foreign “filmmakers,” and cameras rolling.
Angel and Jaime claimed they didn’t exploit the credit cards they got in wallets, though they occasionally sold them to a fence. They received so little money for credit cards that they usually just threw them away. They wanted cash; the wallets they took usually contained $40-100, sometimes as much as $200. (Panama uses U.S. currency.)
Jaime listened intently and answered intelligently.
Now that they’re out of the business, the boys miss the healthy takings they used to enjoy. They find it difficult to live on their legitimate incomes of two to three dollars a day, which they get from the government.
Bob interviews Angel amid the ruins of an unused schoolyard.
Panama City, Panama—As Bob and Angel spoke, a tall, handsome boy appeared dribbling a basketball. Soon he was part of our interview. His name was Jaime. He and Angel grew up together, were gangsters and pickpockets together, and were now together in the rehabilitation program.
As pickpockets, Angel and Jaime worked on buses as people got on and off them, at sports events, and at rock concerts.
Jaime, left, is bright and engaging, with the magnetic personality and intense eyes that Angel lacks.
Jaime took a crisp, clean Manila folder from under his arm, which he had brought along specifically to demonstrate how he used it—or something—to shield his handiwork. I was impressed that he had thought to bring a prop. Bob now addressed his questions to Jaime, whose alert demeanor was a welcome improvement over Angel’s empty, shifty eyes. Jaime was engaging, eager to answer, intelligent.
Jaime and Angel demonstrate their classic drop-stall-bump-steal method.
Their best method was the classic “sandwich,” in which one of them would drop keys or coins in front of a mark while the other nabbed his wallet from behind. They demonstrated using Bob as the victim. Then Jaime showed a close-up of his extraction technique. He gripped just a corner of the wallet and sort of zigzagged it up and out of the pocket. He smiled brightly, and I thought he’d make an excellent tour guide some day. Angel, if he’s lucky, might be suitable as a fry cook, or maybe a bell boy.
Buses in Panama are privately owned and serious works of art.
Panama City, Panama—Too much laundry was hung too neatly on a wire line stretched across the broken schoolyard. This boy can’t be that industrious, I thought. There was cooked rice in a dog food bowl under a mango tree, and I heard a tv. Several tattooed toughs gave us a sideways glance. Were they former gangsters, too, or… gangsters? With a pole and bent hanger, they were trying to snag a mango from the tree in the center of the schoolyard.
Angel observes nervously as Bob readies his cameras.
 Â
Angel kicked dust while Bob and I set up equipment among the ruins of the school. Countless skinny, mangy dogs wandered past. Angel had agreed to be interviewed on camera, but we were concerned that he’d have second thoughts. We tried to set up quickly. To use as a sofa, Bob dragged over the wooden frame of something long disintegrated. I sat down in the dusty earth and balanced a video camera on my knee.
Angel’s account of the pickpocket business was not too different from others of his plebeian level around the world. Basically, he practiced subsistence stealing, but his gang involvement added a vicious element. All Panamanian gang members carry guns, purportedly to protect themselves, despite the fact that if they get caught carrying a gun, they automatically get several years in prison. Regardless, they carry 9mm guns.
Eventually, Angel loosened up.
Angel lit a cigarette and showed us a recent bullet wound on his hand. He was shot by a rival gangster who didn’t know or believe that Angel had given up gang membership. He said it’s dangerous to live in this gangland without belonging, but admitted that it was equally dangerous to belong. He was covered with gang tats.
