Vegas – Page 2 – Thiefhunters in Paradise

Social engineering—is it time to curtail trust?

Judy Stevens, who has more than 270 identities.

A couple of scumbags have been casing neighborhoods in Las Vegas, preying on elders. They chat up residents, pretending to be a former resident or a relative of a neighbor. They ask questions and gather information. When they’ve learned enough about someone elderly on the street, they approach the senior armed with facts and trivia—enough to garner the senior’s confidence. In every case, the bottom line is that they need money. The money’s not for them, of course; it’s for one of the neighbors, who is in a costly (fictitious) emergency situation, something medical, or maybe legal. The two solicitors are merely good samaritans.

Rick Shawn, who has more than 1,000 identities.

Classic social engineering. This pair of con artists has bilked 19 known victims in Las Vegas, all over age 73, out of tens of thousands of dollars. It’s likely that they’re connected to similar incidents in Arizona and California; it’s probable that many other victims exist, unaware they’ve been scammed, or embarrassed to come forward.

It sounds like a couple on a crime spree, but it’s much more than that. From our intensive workshop with NABI, we know that this is organized crime. Assistant district attorney Scott Mitchell called them gypsies. Most likely, they are members of one of the families called Travelers. These families move from town to town as they pull their scams, often on the elderly. They have a large repertoire, including sweetheart swindles, pigeon drops, fake lotto schemes, and home repair. Many of these are combined with plain old burglary.

The Travelers are organized crime families. So organized, that when they find a particularly gullible victim, they pass his info to the next family members scheduled to roll through that town. Then, even if the victim realizes that the roof repair or driveway resurfacing job was shoddy, he won’t recognize the brother or cousin who offers to paint the house with leftover paint from a job down the street, or the sister collecting funds for the sick man a few houses down.

'My dog is accused of eating neighbours chicken Plyz help with bail.' Don't be tempted.

These fraudsters go to extremes in order to impersonate a good samaritan. Through social engineering, they manipulate their victims with a realistic story, bamboozle them with bullshit, dupe them, and exploit them. It always ends one way: the victims’ money in the Travelers’ hands. The two pictured above go so far as to drive their victims to their banks or ATMs.

These two have been arrested and are being held, as of this moment, at Clark County Detention Center in Las Vegas. Travelers are known to have lawyers on retainer and bail money at the ready. Although the two are considered flight risks, they may bail out on the condition that they wear GPS ankle devices.

Actually, that’s not likely. I just spoke with Lieutenant Bob Sebby, Las Vegas Metro, who said that 15 additional victims have been confirmed. Metro is asking other victims to come forward.

Las Vegas’ most prolific prostitutes

52-Pickup—Las Vegas police are suddenly, aggressively, picking up prostitutes in the “resort corridor” of the city. Armed with a deck—or a list, anyway—of our “50 most prolific prostitutes,” vice cops nabbed almost half of them in the first two weeks of the initiative.

Meanwhile, Las Vegas promotes sex, women, and “anything goes” in its siren call to visitors.

Meanwhile, the talks go on about legalizing, or at least decriminalizing, prostitution in Vegas, as in 10 out of our 16 counties.

What is Vegas if not one big hypocritical contradiction? Prostitution creates a “bad image for Las Vegas,” says Metro Vice Lt. Karen Hughes. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, beckon the ads. Barbara Brents, a sociology professor at UNLV, said it best: “It seems pretty hypocritical to me to have an economy based on sexualizing women and then to come down on the women when police want to make it seem like they’re enforcing the law.”

Aren’t there better things for Las Vegas Metropolitan Police to do? Eastern Europeans have invaded and are having a heyday with fraud and id theft. Home invasions are on the rise, too, and are non-consensual, unlike prostitution.

In the Las Vegas Review Journal’s Sunday cover story this past weekend, Hughes said “it’s time to stop the revolving door of prostitution-related arrests, especially when those arrests involve ‘trick rolls.'” Well of course, arrest thieves! Whether it’s a pickpocket, or a prostitute who empties her sleeping client’s wallet, book ’em.

Hughes goes on to say they “want to minimize opportunities for prostitutes to be aggressive with the tourists and with men who aren’t interested in that.” Aggressive sales tactics are annoying, I agree. I particularly detest the loud recorded radio-style ads blasted through hotel speakers onto the Strip. I’m not fond of the hundreds (it seems) of Mexican men and women (they are all Mexican, and they all wear earphones) who shove escort ads at passers-by, whether they’re interested or not. They create an awful lot of litter, too. And I’m especially irked by the saleskids in the malls who accost passers-by with questions meant to engage, meant to stop a person to create an opportunity for a sales pitch.

Oh, and it’s okay to aggressively solicit porn stars on huge, well-lit billboards.

I haven’t done a survey, but I bet a large proportion of our visitors enjoy temporarily flirting with the naughtiness Vegas cooked up. They can be momentary voyeurs, or daring participants, wannabes, or shrinking lurkers, aghast but rapt. We know one thing: trying to appeal to the family crowd didn’t work, and isn’t what Vegas wants.

Why not legalize prostitution? No one need buy the product unless it’s wanted. Legalize brothels, and no one need see the product unless they want it. It would end trick-rolls. It would be safe for the working girl and safe for the customer. Our mayor, who won’t publicly “advocate it,” says a Little Amsterdam red-light district in Vegas would generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the city.

Otherwise, I’ve got an idea for the pimps. Leave the girls at home. Keep them off the streets, where they’ll just be arrested. Put them in front of a web cam, and show your iPod or iPhone to potential clients. Call her on your cellphone and introduce her to the john. Let them speak. Let her stay safe (and warm, or cool), while you do the soliciting. Just until prostitution is legalized.

Las Vegas police prostitution

Las Vegas people

There’s no question that Las Vegas attracts an upside-down bell curve of residents, no matter what scale one uses for measurement. We have a lot of gamblers, drunks, deadbeats, quick-buck-artists (or wannabes), fraudsters, greedsters, and lowlifes. We have transients, dreamers, and losers. We have a high ratio of service personnel to professionals, making our population quite unlike other cities. Not too many intellectuals choose to live in Las Vegas.

So I wasn’t surprised to see a billboard showing a naked hunk (strategically held box in hand), offering $500 to “show us your package.” Another billboard shows a sexy-chick, not unlike the “gentlemen’s club” billboards all over town, but its headline is “Co-Stars Needed. Earn $500 tonight.” Another says “Get Tugged. Get $1000. The Las Vegas Review Journal published a lengthy article about this public pitch for future porn stars, complete with video.

Such a Vegas story. No wonder most people don’t want to raise their families here. Children grow up with billboards and taxi ads showing suggestive near-nudity, Cirque du Soleil is the dominant cultural activity, and the phonebook has color pages of “entertainers.”

I’ve known my fair share of people in alt jobs here in Vegas. I used to have a friend in the 900-number business. On a tour of his phone-sex factory floor, he explained that he liked to hire the handicapped, the overweight, and the ugly. He was no altruistic hero; he simply found that these employees made him more money in the phone-sex business. After all, he told us, most of the men calling in wanted compassion more than passion, and empathy above eroticism. To maximize minutes on the line, the callers had to feel heard and understood.

This fascinating, off-the-charts man, this friend we long-ago lost touch with, had let me read a book he’d written. I don’t recall its title, or know if it was ever published. The book was an argument against marriage and a lesson in how to find, and write a “modular contract” for, a mistress. His experience had taught him, he told us, that a man is better off defining his expectations and paying a woman to fulfill them, than living locked in blind hope of compatibility and paying after the fact in support and settlement. His modular contract was meant to be renegotiated once or twice a year to both parties’ satisfaction, pay adjusted.

Over the years of our friendship, we met a series of his mistresses. I particularly remember “Miss Kitty” and “Peaches.” Our friend advertised for his women in the jobs sections of newspaper classifieds. High pay, odd work hours, no skills or experience necessary. And no baggage. He wanted women who’d hit bottom, had no place to go. No kids. No family. He interviewed the applicants with brutal honesty. His demands included renaming the woman, choosing her clothing (sleazy—which he bought for her), and her undivided attention to him during her working hours. During the years that we knew him, and now, after hearing an update from a mutual friend, I don’t think that he found any more happiness than ordinary married folks (divorced or not).

I used to live in a townhouse in Las Vegas, where my next door neighbor was a prostitute. Uh… entertainer. When she went out she’d turn on her answering machine, but she must not have realized how loud it’s volume was. We heard all her messages. “Hey baby, I’m coming into town tonight…” etc. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but enough that she gave me a key to go in and feed her cat when she went away for a few weeks. One time, her brother, a stranger to me, showed up at my door, begging for cash. I gave him $20, out of fear. A few months later, when my neighbor was out of town again, she called me and asked me to go in and see what was missing. She’d just been tipped off that her brother had burglarized her house. He had.

I have other interesting Vegas friends with odd jobs. One runs a porn site. One started AmericanLowlife.com, a swingers social networking site. If you live in Vegas, you meet these sorts. I like odd people.

Las Vegas porn sex industry

How to cut down a tree; Requiem for a tree

[dropcap letter=”I”]t was a mesquite, 35 or so feet tall, graceful in an awkward way. Craving light, the poor thing crooked its trunk this way and that, having been stupidly planted under a roof and beside a wall. I’ve liked the tree a lot all these years, for its lush green foliage and shade—rare commodities in Las Vegas.

For various reasons, it had to go. And there was only one man for the job.

My brother-in-law, the self-proclaimed Swedish Okie and country bumpkin whom I’ve written about before, single-handedly brought the tree down.

Now you can’t just take a buzz saw to the trunk of a tree in close quarters and yell “timber!” There’s no safe place for the tree to fall, and it’s weight is enormous, full of life juices and wearing a lush canopy of green. There are windows in the proximity, fences, landscapes, tiles, other trees, all of which would suffer damage.

How to cut down a tree

Brother-in-law started with the canopy, removing all the light branches and a great deal of weight, using a hand saw. He did this while standing on a 10-foot ladder he had strapped onto a 16-foot ladder. Each branch was tied, cut, and lowered to the ground. Bob threw them over the wall. I bundled. When I began, the mound of branches was taller than I am. When I’d tied up a dozen bundles, the mountain of branches was just as high.

When it came to the hefty limbs, the lumberjack needed an assistant. The tree was to be dismantled from the top down in bite-sized chunks. A limb was tied, and its rope wound around a lower piece of trunk, pulley-fashion, and Bob was to keep pressure on the rope until it was cut through. When the new log was free, Bob lowered it gently to the ground with the rope. Brilliant system.

My brother-in-law knows all this because, like any good Swede who has the time and money, he has a country house. That is, he built a house in the forest outside of Stockholm. After clearing the land. Most of it he did himself. He’s still working on it, bit by bit, every summer.

The trunk of the mesquite was sawn into 23 gorgeous logs.

Something seems a little missing from my front courtyard now, but only a little. Other than the trunk, the tree’s glory was above the roof. I miss it anyway.

brother-in-law claes Las Vegas Sweden

Criminal on the loose

Why am I compelled to run outside every time I hear the police helicopter hovering over my house? If there’s a criminal on the loose, isn’t it possible, at least remotely possible, that he’ll run into my yard to hide? My eyes are riveted to the helicopter, but I watch the brick wall, too.

criminal Las Vegas

When courtesy is exhausting

Had to go to the Apple store in the mall last night, and it turned into a long visit while Bob sorted out some issues with windows on his Mac. I left and wandered around the mall, an activity I normally detest.

It wasn’t crowded at all, despite the time of year. No surprise. What surprised me was the aggressive behavior of the sales people, especially at the kiosks that litter the walkways. A glance at the wares piled on the carts and in the booths, even while on the move, garnered at least a beckoning call. Veering too close guaranteed a come-on. But some sales staff were worse. I heard one man ask a long-haired woman if she used a blow-dryer. The woman wasn’t even looking at his kiosk, just walking past. She stopped and answered the man (positive reinforcement of his behavior).

By the time I’d gone to one end of the mall, I was fed up with being accosted. Walking back, I looked at no one and nothing. I wasn’t grouchy but I probably looked it. I just didn’t feel like being harassed. Then a bright-eyed man took a few fast steps toward me.

“Can I ask you a question?” he asked with urgency, as if I could suddenly enlighten him.

“Absolutely not,” I replied with spirit, not slowing down at all.

The mall in Las Vegas is like being in a third-world market, where every stall owner begs for the attention of passersby. I feel for them. And many of the sales people are from struggling nations. We are now a struggling nation, too. So I guess the hard-sell is the new rule. You don’t want to be rude to the ropers and the barkers. You start off smiling and polite. But after five minutes, or an hour, or a week, depending on your tolerance, it becomes exhausting. Courtesy becomes exhausting.

Las Vegas shopping

Luggage theft at Las Vegas airport carousels

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?

Bambi and Bob Arno with luggage. No carousel here!

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

airport luggage theft travel

Foreigners in Las Vegas

My Swedish brother-in-law came to visit us in Las Vegas. While Bob and I were off on a trip, he decided to upgrade our garden. He drove our car to the local nursery to buy some plants. As he approached the nursery, driving slowly, the car was suddenly rushed by a gang of shouting Mexicans. My brother-in-law went cold, he told us later: cold sweat, pounding heart, racing thoughts. The Mexicans were all shouting as they surrounded the car. “If I stop, it’s all over,” my brother-in-law thought, “I’ll lose the car.” So he inched forward, knuckles white on the wheel, staring straight ahead.

The Mexicans fell back and my brother-in-law turned into the nursery, parking safely. He leaned back and let out a huge breath, wondering how this could happen, or almost happen, in Las Vegas, in broad daylight, in a busy street. He sat in the car for a few minutes, gathering his composure. As another car approached the nursery, he watched the scene repeat itself from a comfortable distance, and realized that these were men seeking work. Choose me!, they must have been shouting, in competition with each other. Let me dig your hole!

He now goes into hysterics remembering his misinterpretation of the incident.

It’s not for nothing that my brother-in-law calls himself a Swedish Okie and a country bumpkin. This is the man we brought to a Chinese restaurant once, who scrunched up his face and pulled “some trash” out of his mouth when eating a fortune cookie.

brother-in-law claes Las Vegas

Video surveillance

Who’s looking at you when you buy a coffee? It’s creepy, when you know all they can see.

At the World Game Protection Conference in Las Vegas earlier this year, where Bob was a keynote speaker, I saw SmartConnect‘s live demo of actual video surveillance. The client we spied on was a coffee chain store at McCarren Airport. No surprise that I saw the employees and customers, but I also saw an image of each customer’s itemized receipt—as it was generated. I could see all stats pertaining to each transaction in real time, as if I were there. Did the cashier apply an employee discount to the sale? Did she leave the cash drawer open for more than x seconds? Just how many employee discounts did that cashier register today, anyway?

It was all there, laid out on one big screen, along with multiple video images of the employees and customers as they interacted. On a giant plasma display with almost life-size images, it truly felt like peeking over the shoulder of the employees.

spy video surveillance

Bambi + Las Vegas = stripper

Bambi and Flower, characters from Felix Salten's 1923 book, made famous by Disney's animated movie.

“Bambi? In Las Vegas? Really? Are you a stripper? [Guffaw.]”

If your name is Bambi and you live in Las Vegas, these, apparently, are fair questions. I get them all the time. Sometimes they don’t ask, they just blacklist my email address. Bambi with a Vegas IP address could only be a certain you-know-what.

It’s no wonder, really: the Las Vegas phonebook has 110 pages of entertainers. And you know what I mean by entertainers. The naughty, discrete, spicy, barely legal, and exotic kind. They’re Swedish, Russian, Swiss, Vietnamese (twins!), Japanese, Korean, Thai, French, and Chinese. They’re sweet, new in town, and fiery. For years, my name was on the back of taxi cabs all over town, lasciviously illustrated with promises of bounty.

Being blacklisted is a pain but easily correctable. I communicate with quite a few police departments, and they’re the biggest offenders. So I do a fair bit of resending, while feeling like an illicit trifle, a forbidden floozy trying to regain her honor.

Here’s how introductions usually go:

Man: Really, Bambi? [[heh-heh] Like the deer?
Me: Yeah, right.
Man: And you live in Las Vegas? Are you a dancer? [read: stripper.]

or:

Woman: Bambi, cute. Is that your real name?
Me: It is, yes.
Woman: Where’s Thumper? [ha-ha] Just kidding.

According to my parents, I was not named after the Disney character, the one in the film made from Felix Salten’s 1923 book, Bambi, a Life in the Woods. My parents insist their inspiration was Bambi Lynn, a dancer best known for her appearance in the 1955 film Oklahoma!. But who was she named for?

As a kid, I had a few nicknames I dare not resurrect. None pleased or bothered me. None lingered, probably because I moved so many times. One move had me in a new school at the start of second grade. The teacher asked if anyone had a nickname or middle name she and the class should use. Aha, I thought, I do, and raised my hand. Lyn, I said. Sure, said the teacher. And all was well until I brought home my first paper. My mother said What’s this? That’s not the name we gave you! It was a meek and humiliated little girl who had to change her name in front of everybody the next day. Probably scarred me for life. Or made me shoulder my burden and bear it.

Two years ago, I was interviewed on television by a Thai woman named Flower. Bambi is Flower’s guest today. Sounds too cute. Most people probably switched channels at that point.

I think a lot about names, how people grow into them, or don’t; how people modify them, or don’t; the effect they have on the bearer and others; the significance or insignificance of them. And how people carry their own names. What they are called vs. what they like to be called.

Many people feel compelled to crack a joke about my name when they meet me. They think they’re being original. I haven’t heard a new one in decades. I don’t have any good comebacks, either. Have any suggestions? I realize how silly it might feel to use my name. I’ve known women named Ditty, Cheery, Bunny, and Honey, and I’ve cringed using their names. Then I remember that I have a toy name, too. A cartoon name.

I’m against middle names, like mine and my sisters’, chosen only for their sound. I like them to have some importance or meaning. I’ve convinced more than one woman to give her maiden name to her child as a middle name.

I like my last name. Not too common but still ordinary; easy to spell and pronounce around the world. A relief after my exotic first name. My mother and father were both Vincents, so I’m double-strength. Of course I couldn’t dump it for marriage. (Somehow, my three sisters had no problem ditching it, though.)

Despite the sound of this rant, I’m not complaining. I wouldn’t like a boring name like Linda or Kathy (sorry Linda and Kathy), or a funny name like Gladys (Happy-bottom). I’ve been amused by many a name: women named Wonder, Spratley, Greer, and Phelps. In South Africa, I knew a man named Lastborn and a woman named Surprise (Lastborn’s younger sister?). Having a name that amuses others is not so bad. Even I am amused when someone forgets my name. Something I imagine is so shiny and neon-colored and remarkable can be vin-ordinaire to some.

Bambi Vincent disney flower names

PICKPOCKETS, CON ARTISTS, GANGSTERS, THIEVES, AND TRAVEL