Las Vegas – Pickpocket Bob Arno

Three-card monte expert Rod the Hop, R.I.P.

Rod-the-Hop, three-card monte, card mechanic, slot mechanic

They’s ony three kinda men I won’t play with: That’s a po’ man, a blind man, an a police-man!

Rod the Hop, my Las Vegas three-card-monte informer, died last month, aged 56. He was a card tosser whose demonstrations proved that drills teach skills for life. He set up in areas with less police presence, favoring the sidewalks outside large factories, especially on payday, “where there’s eight hundred people going to lunch and they have to walk by you,” he said.

“A real good spot is outside military bases, where you’ve got a lot of young, naïve kids with nothing much to do and a little bit of money to spend.

“The moves are easy. You can learn it in a day and be good in a week. It’s the presentation that’s important. You have to have unflinching audacity and unmitigated gall. I don’t get intimidated.”

I love the way Rod spoke.

He was renown as a “card mechanic,” which is a card manipulator, as entertainment and teaching, and/or cheating in card games. As a card mechanic, Rod the Hop worked both ends. He was loved by the worldwide magic community; and had four felony convictions for casino cheating.

He was also renown as a “slot mechanic,” which could mean slot machine repairman but, in Rod’s case, meant he was a convicted slot machine cheat. Just last year he had the honor of becoming person number 34 in Nevada’s Excluded Person List, aka “the Black Book.”

He told us he tore apart and studied slot machines in his apartment, so he had to use a friend’s place as his “official” address so his parole officers wouldn’t find them.

Travelers may encounter three-card monte games anywhere. Players are purposely given a glimpse of the target early in the scramble, a skillful slip is performed by the tosser, and players thereafter carefully track the wrong object with confidence.

I’ve called three-card monte a “game” but, like the three-shell game, they’re games of no chance: tricks and traps. You’ll see other players win and walk away, but they are, in fact, shills. You cannot win. If you win once, it’s at the tosser’s pleasure in hope you, or someone in his audience, will bet big.

Advice from a three-card monte expert

In the words of Rod the Hop

The object of three-card monte is to make money. Each person in the crew gets an equal end. Some days it’s good and—it’s a street game so obviously you can only make as much money as what a person has in their pocket. But if you make two or three hundred dollars apiece a day, then you’ve done what you set out to do. Most of it has to do with grift sense, and your con and your presentation. That’s more than the skill factor, I would say.

It’s just a hustle. I mean, you just do the best you can and you prey on tourists or suckers that don’t know they’re breathing air.

What I look for in a sucker is, they’ve got money, number one. And that they’re a sucker. I don’t have a conscious thought pattern that goes through my mind when I see a sucker. I know a sucker when I see one. I just do. I’ve been doing it so long, I know a candy bar when I see one. That’s all there is to it.

But by the same token, I know someone that’s not a sucker, or might be a cop, or somebody that knows the game. I can just feel it. I just know a sucker when I see one and my crew does too. You know that when you pick a crew. I don’t go out and say, yeah, he looks like a pretty good thief and has a lot of grift sense, I’ll get him. The deciding factor whether you have a good crew or a bad crew is how much grift sense all your partners have. But most of the time you’re not going to hook up with someone that doesn’t have grift sense.

You’ll find the game in the back of buses, train stations, things like that. Very seldom do you see it in the streets, cause if it’s windy it’ll blow the cards open.

I used to go outside a factory. Believe it or not, all you have to do is set up a box and start throwing cards and people will just stop by to see what you’re doing. You don’t have to say anything. Then you start betting with the shills. And pretty soon people get to realize that it’s a betting game. I’ll keep throwing it, and my shills will be betting, and they’ll be winning and the sucker sees them winning, and so they want to bet. And I might even let the sucker win some if I see other suckers that might have more money.

So, the red card’s on the bottom of the two cards and the black card’s on top. When I throw the cards down, I’ll throw the top card instead of the bottom card, which is the red card. But first, just to get into the rhythm of it, I’ll do it for real. I’ll throw the red card on the bottom, and let them watch where it is, very slowly, and they’re watching and wondering where the red card is. And there’s no question where the red card is.

And they’ll want to bet, so I’ll say, well here, let me do it again. And then I’ll pick them up and they’ll say, oh gosh, I was right. I knew where the red card was. And then I’ll do it again, and now they’ll want to bet. When I don’t want them to win is when I’ll throw the top cards. And then obviously they’ll lose.

You would think that a normal person would think, wait a minute, I knew where the red card was. I bet on it and I lost. Why? Well you’d think a guy would just quit. But no, not suckers. Suckers go, ‘wait, this time I’m really going to watch him.’ And then they’ll bet more money, and it just goes on and on until they don’t have any more money. So I try to entice as many suckers as I can to bet on it. Then, when everybody’s out of money, I take the cards, stick them in my pocket, and walk away. And then we’ll go somewhere else.

I’m where there’s people. Where there’s people there’s money, and where there’s money there’s me. And that’s where you do con games. You can’t do it if there’s no customers. Where there’s people, there’s suckers, and where there’s suckers, there’s people like me.

The reason people try to beat this game is because of the skill of the operator. It’s my presentation. I say, ‘look, I want to show you something.’ First off, I say ‘this isn’t three-card monte.’ Because then you’re thinking, this is not three-card monte. I tell them that you win on the red and you lose on the black. Now watch. Here’s a red card. I’m just going to set it right there. Then here’s a black card and I want to set it right there, and just switch them. Now where’s the red card? Will you bet on something like that? Well sure you would, if you were a betting man. But if you’re not a betting man, you’re not going to do it.

And this is a cliché that everyone uses, that you can’t beat an honest man. Well, you can’t beat someone that’s not trying to win your money. You can remember that. As a hustler, and doing the three-card monte, I cannot get my money from someone that’s not trying to get my money first.

This is a real old game, this three-card monte. I know it’s at least a hundred years old. It’s in a book a hundred years old, published in 1902. But each generation that’s never seen it before thinks they can beat it. There will always be suckers.

Look, three-card monte is a great little hustle in the street. And frankly, I don’t do it any more because there’s not enough money in it for me. It’s only as good as how much money a person has in their pocket at that time—right now. How many people walk around nowadays with eight hundred dollars in their pocket, or a thousand? Or even three hundred? You know what they got? They got about six dollars and fourteen credit cards. That’s what people have nowadays. They don’t carry around cash. The only people that carry cash nowadays are criminals.

The one good thing about three-card monte and the three-shell game and the short cons like that, is it’s a good training ground for con men, for grifters. It’s a prep school, if you will. Most people grow out of it.

If you’re a tourist and you see a three-card monte, don’t stop and look at it and think, well I know that he throws the top one sometimes and maybe sometimes he throws the bottom one, or whatever. I’m telling you right now. Do not play it. Cause it’s a guarantee, you cannot win. It’s simple as that. And that’s my advice. I can promise you, you cannot beat it. Just go on down the road when you see it.

Like Rod the Hop, Bob Arno, the famous pickpocket, is also known in and has deep knowledge of the worlds of magic and crime. Watching Rod work, Bob was impressed with his coolness, his social-engineering, his roping-in of “suckers.”

I was impressed with his patter. Here are a few of his lines, usually delivered in a rapid-fire drawl while his hands were flying and his mind was sizing up potential marks:

“This here ain’t no three card monte, this here’s the Mexican pitti-pat, where you win on the red and you lose on the black…

“Watch me now, I’m gonna race ’em and chase ’em, so watch where I place ’em…”

“If you gotta lotta nerve and you gotta lotta plenty, five’ll getcha ten and ten’ll getcha twenty…”

“I’ve played this game with Yankees and Southerners, Senators and Governors. Money on the card or no bet, where’s the red? If I can bluff you I can beat you. Come on bet five, bet ten! Ho down now, get your chicken dinner in the center, where’s the red?…”

[Thanks to Paul Chosse, who thought to put these lines in writing back in 2005.]

Rest in peace, Roderick William Dee.

Adapted from Travel Advisory: How to Avoid Thefts, Cons, and Street Scams
Chapter Eight: Con Artists and Their Games of No Chance

Gas pump skimmers attached in 11 seconds

Breaking news from Las Vegas Metro’s Kim Thomas, the fraud cop featured in my story on credit card skimmers hidden in gas pumps.

Detective Thomas writes:

I read the post you did with my picture. It was very impressive. At the end you said a thief attached a skimmer in eight minutes. I just wanted to give you a small correction. We found that the one on the side of the gas pump drawer was attached in about 11 seconds, so if you add in opening the door, you’re looking at about 30 seconds (and that’s us fumbling with the key). So here’s the process: put the key in the lock, open the door, slide out the drawer, unplug the two cables from the gas pump connectors (keypad and reader cables), slap on the device, plug the two gas pump cables into the skimmer, plug the skimmer cables into the gas pump connectors, slide the drawer in, close the outside door, turn the key, remove it, test with a known credit card (outside the process of hooking the skimmer because anyone seeing you do that would assume you’ve doing something legitimate. Sounds like a lot, but look at a watch, close your eyes, and envision the process, then look at the watch and see what kind of time you get. It’ll probably amaze you. Now imagine practicing it a bit on your own gas pump either in your storage unit or living room or buddy’s gas pump. Now you’ve gotten faster and smoother, so you’re faster. See?

Thomas continues on the frightening trajectory of credit card fraud:

This type of crime used to be done strictly by hi-tech crews, but now we’re seeing it done by Joe and Julie the tweeker people (common street criminals), the traditional black crews who used to be just check passers and bust-out crooks, and the Hispanic immigrant groups who have always supplied ID documents (to name a few groups). There’s just so much money and property in this.

A hotel loyalty card and its data showing on a skimmer

I just asked for a warrant on a member of a group of rich college kids (who bought a $7,500.00 watch in a high end Fashion Show Mall store) who have been buying numbers skimmed from American hotel chains in Europe, then using that track data to make counterfeits (this is a good way to do it because the cards are from American customers and less likely to raise a red flag with the bank looking at the transaction since it’s used in the US), which they then use at stores here, in SoCal, and in Arizona. They then take the property and sell it. The kicker is that all these kids are Mexican nationals whose parents are so wealthy they have their kids going to school at American Universities.

See our pickpocket summary page.

credit card fraud identity theft Las Vegas skimmer

Las Vegas real estate business ethics

Legal-but-dirty, beat-the-system, shady business is being committed by Las Vegas homeowners at the inducement of a real estate agent, as reported by Joel Stein in TIME magazine (8/14/09 issue).

[Real estate agent Brooke] Boemio specializes in short selling, in a particularly Vegas way. Basically, she finds clients who owe more on their house than the house is worth (and that’s about 60% of homeowners in Las Vegas) and sells them a new house similar to the one they’ve been living in at half the price they paid for their old house. Then she tells them to stop paying the mortgage on their old place until the bank becomes so fed up that it’s willing to let the owner sell the house at a huge loss rather than dragging everyone through foreclosure. Since that takes about nine months, many of the owners even rent out their old house in the interim, pocketing a profit.

“It’s greedy. But we’re all doing it. Because why not?” It’s very hard, she says, to suffer as the one honest person in a town of successful con artists.

I have no problem suffering as the one honest person in Vegas and I know many others who’d say the same. Boemio seems to be implying that she has given up honesty and joined the con artists of Las Vegas. In a blog about scams and cons, how can I not report this smelly business allegedly occurring in my own backyard?

First though, I’m wondering why banks extend loans to people who already have a hefty mortgage. How do they qualify? Easy, says a real estate lawyer I consulted. The buyer claims the new house will be owner occupied, while the old one will provide income from rent. While investor loans may be hard to get right now, those for owner-occupied houses are not. The fact that the borrowers can afford to pay their mortgage—they just don’t want to!—and default on the loan, choosing to give their money to another lender on a “better” deal is a question of ethics, not legality. If you’re a person of principle, you might have a hard time walking away from the promise you made to pay back your loan. If you’re a Vegas scumbag, or a con artist, or really, really hurting financially, there’s another option: you can simply skip on the loan. Because, why not?

Ever hear of the Golden Rule, Boemio? “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” What a simple way to fix the world.

Anyway, back to scams and cons. While the broker is scamming the system, she’s not committing fraud. The homeowners knowingly and temporarily destroy their own credit for the privilege of upgrading their homes and lowering their financial obligations. But otherwise, only the banks are hurt—and who pities the banks? It seems to be the state of Las Vegas and, actually, the state of the country. Look out for yourself. Get what you can. Screw the other guy.

This is practically the definition of kiasu, the Chinese-Singaporean attitude of “me first.” Bob and I spent much time in Singapore, but never quite got the hang of pushing to the front of the line, taking all the lychees on the buffet in case there were no more later, diving into a train before the departing passengers can get off, etc.

We’ve imported so much from Asia. Now we have kiasu, If you don’t believe in the Golden Rule, get the hang of kiasu. Because, why not?

Las Vegas scam Singapore

Skimmers and credit card fraud (more)

Credit card fraud: Would you notice if a skimmer were attached to an ATM? — Would you notice if a skimmer were attached to an ATM?

Skimmers, officially called magnetic card readers, capture the data on a card’s magnetic strip. Exactly what information is that?

Credit and debit cards have three “tracks” of data. Track 1 stores your name, account number and expiration date, and discretionary data to verify the PIN and security code. This information goes to the point of sale terminal, and allows your receipt to include your name and the last four digits of your account number.

Track 2 stores similar information coded and formatted specifically for the banking industry. This is the data that, from a merchant, goes to the bank via modem. Actually, it goes to an “acquirer,” a middle-man organization that authenticates the account data and guarantees payment to the merchant.

Track 3 was supposed to store biometrics, like a photo and thumbprint, but the banks decided it was too expensive to implement and do not use track 3 at all. It’s sometimes used on non-bank cards: airline cards, hotel and club memberships, etc. Track 3 is also writable.

Credit card fraud

Legitimate mag-strip readers are everywhere. Illegitimate ones, which I’ll refer to as skimmers, are, too. They may be stuck onto the faces of ATMs or gas pumps (possibly detectable). They may be attached to a merchant’s point-of-sale terminal (undetectable by customer, should be detectable by aware merchant). They have recently been found inside gas pumps (undetectable). Tiny, handheld models are used by waiters and others who swipe credit cards legitimately; they make an additional, criminal swipe through the portable skimmer.

Mag-strip readers are easily, legally purchased. The largest distributor is (no surprise) just outside Las Vegas. Bob met with the owner of the business, and bought a skimmer. The owner claims that his largest customers are schools and libraries, which buy in bulk in order to record attendance and keep track of books. I’ve heard from law enforcement that his biggest customer is the FBI, which buys skimmers, encodes them with trackable ID, and lets them fall into the wrong hands.

Our skimmer, pictured below, captures all three data tracks. Bob could have bought one half the size with twice the storage and a bluetooth interface for twice the price. The kind just pulled from the apron of a waiter at a high-end restaurant at Caesar’s Forum in Las Vegas—a restaurant frequented by a celebrity clientele (i.e. high-limit credit cards).

Whether obtained by an employee using a handheld skimmer, or one attached to stationary equipment, card data is gathered and stored, then collected by wired download or wireless transmission. Then what?

Someone called “afterlife” wrote:

Credit card theft is a growing problem but it does not happen the way most people envision it.Â It’s not the lone hacker who goes it alone to compromise one site and sell the credit card numbers to fraudsters.

These days it’s a network of carders who each have a specific role.Â Roman Vega of Boa Factory fame was known for having lawyers, botnet owners, hackers, traffickers, and pushers all on staff.Â These days the professional carder will knock over several merchants and store the information without using it for up to two years.Â Once they have amassed enough information they join the databases together forming a master datasheet on peoples lives.

Once they join databases with your credit card number and others with your e-mail address they can perform ‘spear phishing’ where they send you a targeted e-mail, with your credit card number, asking for your PIN number.

Credit card fraud: Portable magnetic card reader, aka skimmer. — Portable magnetic card reader, aka skimmer.

Credit card fraud is highly organized, en masse. Besides phishing and spear phishing, data is also written to new cards. These new cards can be blank stock, stolen cards (where sometimes the encoded data does not match what is printed—but who notices that?), gift cards, or shared-value cards. Mag-strip writers can be purchased as easily as mag-strip readers; and some models of readers just need a little extra software in order to write.

Everything one needs for credit card fraud can be learned or purchased on “carder sites.” Skimmer “dumps” are sold in lots, with payment made via Western Union. Here’s a typical “ad,” found among Afterlife’s blog comments (link above). This one’s about six months old:

The Best Dumps for a Good Price. Selling USA.
Hello dear friends. I’m a Memfis.
I have USA dumps, and some Asian.…¨I have a good price for it:
USA…¨20 USD CLASSIC, MASTER…¨25 USD VISA GOLD…¨30 USD VISA PLATINUM AND BUSINESS
ASIA…¨80 USD CLASSIC, MASTER…¨100 USD PLATINUM
I have my own base, good approval percent …“ about 90%…¨USA and Asia …“ 101 only. But I dont have EU bins.
USA …“ original track2.…¨Asia …“ both tracks are original, track1 and track2.
Payment is Western Union.…¨I’m sending order only after recieving payment, in 3-24 hours.…¨I have a replace pocily, but i should know what cards declined or holdcall in 24 hours, to replace it, in other time i wont replace.
For real buyers:…¨I can proove my quality, message me my ICQ.

Credit card fraud: Latest ATM skimmer, with measurement in centimeters. — Latest ATM skimmer, with measurement in centimeters.

Here’s a good thing: some of these gizmos hidden in gas pumps cause the pump to fail, so they’re found. But there’s bad news, too. Data from skimmers slyly hidden in gas pumps and other good places is often not used for three or four months. Why ruin a good thing if the skimmer is steadily transmitting account numbers and PINs? When credit card holders start reporting fraud, the common merchant on the victims’ accounts will be investigated and the device will be pulled. Has your card already been skimmed? Has mine?

Read our summary page of pickpockets, thieves, scammers, and skimmers.

credit card fraud identity theft Las Vegas skimmer

High-tech identity theft today

…¢ Identity theft is now the number one crime in the world.
…¢ Las Vegas is number one in the U.S. for ID theft; even though it’s estimated that only 20% of the crimes are reported.
…¢ The FBI estimates that seven out of every ten stolen dollars end up in Las Vegas. There’s more money in Vegas than most places. Hence Vegas’s place at the top of the ID theft heap.

These wispy facts were spit out by Las Vegas Metro Police Department Forgery Detail’s Detective Kim Thomas at the start of his recent identity theft presentation. Then he got to the scary stuff.

I recently wrote about “profiles,” the findable bits of personal information about an individual. A utility bill constitutes a profile, though not as good of one as a loan application. Envelopes, receipts, statements, are others.

Detective Thomas emphasized the importance of shredding all documents before discarding them. Then he pointed out how something as simple as a discarded box can trigger both a burglary and ID theft. He gave the example of a resident getting a new plasma tv. A trawling thief spots the box at the curb on trash day. He watches the house and notes when it’s unoccupied. Then he steals a truck, kicks in the front door (that’s how they break in nowadays, Det. Thomas explained; no finesse involved), grabs the tv—and the pile of bills in the kitchen at the same time. “Even a box has value to someone,” he said. “Cut it up.”

We can shred.

We can break down our discarded boxes, or take them to dumpsters.

We cannot control how businesses store and discard our data. (My own little example: I went to a health clinic where patients are given forms on clipboards to fill out and return to the desk. When I returned to the unattended desk with my completed forms, I stood staring at other patients’ medical histories and Social Security numbers on the clipboards they’d left on the desk as instructed.)

Credit card data skimmer: the size of a Bic lighter.

But here’s the big thing now: skimmers. Wait! You think you know, but I’m about to describe the very latest in skimmers; not the deck-of-cards-sized box in a waitress’s apron, not the big old multi-part plastic set-ups of yesterday stuck onto ATMs. If you’re not sure exactly what a skimmer is, read the three little paragraphs of my previous post. In the old days (not very long ago), waiters and store clerks were given skimmers to swipe credit cards through and they were paid for the data they collected. But a waiter might talk if caught. A store clerk will be watched if suspected, leading police to the skim-master. And how many cards can they skim in a day, anyway?

Old news: nowadays, skimmers are attached to the fronts of ATMs and gas pumps. Yeah, we know. But you probably don’t know how impressive the latest version is. It’s tiny: 3.5 inches long, by a half inch by a quarter inch. It’s almost impossible to detect. It contains batteries charged by an induction plate and stores data on a camera memory card. It attaches to a thin number pad overlay to capture PINs, and as a secondary method, also has a motion-activated video camera (jury-rigged from a high-end mobile phone) which is time-tagged to match up with the right credit card info. It has a bluetooth transmitter that allows remote, anonymous downloads, which means the skim-master doesn’t have to go near the scene of the crime, once the thing is installed.

About 40 of these tiny self-contained data-collectors have been recovered in Las Vegas in the past month. Probably more by now. Certainly more still out there, too.

Where do you get your gas?

Yes, they’re still stuck onto the fronts of ATMs. But they’re also put inside gas pumps. How do you open a gas pump? Use the same key that opens an RV storage locker, five bucks online. LVMPD found that one of these skimmers can be installed in eight minutes flat. Which, they figure, means the skim-master can probably do it in seven.

Edited 3/15/10 to add: Detective Kim Thomas explains how skimmers are hidden inside gas pumps in about 11 seconds. Yes, 11 seconds!

Yes, there’s more to tell.

credit card fraud identity theft Las Vegas skimmer

ID theft buffet

A former mortgage broker put 40 boxes of customers’ personal information into a Las Vegas dumpster. It was December 2006, but we all knew enough about identity theft already to know better. The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003, effective in 2005, requires the proper disposal of consumer report information and records, as does state law.

The boxes were found and put into safekeeping, probably before any documents were stolen from them. The Las Vegas Sun reported that the boxes contained “tax returns, mortgage applications, bank statements, photocopies of credit cards and drivers’ licenses, at least 230 consumer reports, and other documents containing sensitive consumer information.” Only now is the Federal Trade Commission charging former mortgage broker Gregory Navone with violating the Act.

Five gone-bust mortgage brokers dumped documents at around the same time—five that we know of. We can assume that many others dumped docs too, or deserted their premises complete with documents, which were left for the bad guys to find. No wonder Las Vegas is at the forefront of fraud and identity theft.

Bob and I recently spent many hours with a tweeker (meth-addict) during one of her clean and coherent spells. I’ll call her Kristin, because I can’t use her beautiful, real name. The time was just between her release from jail and her next bust. She had a job, her family had taken her back in and were supportive, and she was poring over a university catalog. She was full of hope and determination.

But the boyfriend…. Still in prison, a meth-cooker and ID thief, due out soon, demanding daily phone calls to keep his girl tied to the old life…

Right. He got out and Kristin disappeared. Back into the cycle of drugs and ID theft. We could have cried for her, this pretty 21-year-old. She was smart, but not strong enough to resist the lure of meth and easy money.

When she was high, she told us, she knew she’d never be caught; she was too clever. She knew she was going to get caught; she was always looking over her shoulder. Confident and paranoid.

In those hours we spent with Kristin, she told us how she used to “get profiles.” A profile is information about a person. It doesn’t have to be much because with a little goes a long way. With a little, you can find the rest.

Her favorite way to get profiles was out of dumpsters located behind businesses. She’d also get quick-credit apps from insiders in casino booths, who’d allow her to take a few off the top on the way to the shredder. Car registrations were good, too, easily found in glove compartments.

With the profiles, she created IDs. First simple ones, just good enough to allow her to purchase the special inks and papers needed to print government IDs. She had the precious printer, but supplies for it are regulated. For Kristin, easy to get around with a simple fake ID, a sweet smile.

With her newly minted IDs and profiles (for herself and her pals), Kristin and her team leased cars. Cadillac SUVs, to be specific, whatever they’re called. They always drove the latest models. They had an endless source of identities, cash, and credit.

They lived in motels, where they set up their mobile meth labs. Kristin, just the clean-up girl in the operation, got too close to the fumes once and got chemical burns on her face, neck, chest, hands, and arms. She was scabbed over for a year. She pointed out the scars, and the thick makeup she wore on her face to minimize them.

In a moment of desperation, Kristin once grabbed the profile of a wealthy family friend from her father’s home office. Tears trickled down her cheeks as she told us how she destroyed the man’s credit—and her father. Because he knew. She was ashamed of herself; mortified. Now she recognized that she was out of jail on an incredibly lucky break. She was going to study to become an architect. She was going to return to ballet.

Kristin’s back at it again, getting profiles, getting cash and credit on other people’s good histories, wreaking havoc. She and how many others?

Many people tell us they’re afraid to shop and bank online. But these activities are not a big factor in identity theft. The real threat is out of our hands. It’s how others keep our information. Big businesses with databases. Small businesses with manila folders. Mom & pops with a property to rent and an old box of rental apps (as I recently found in my garage—and shredded).

One man’s garbage is another’s fortune. Kristin and her friends are ready to exploit that old, forgotten information.

But there’s worse. Much worse. I’ll write about that soon.

identity theft Las Vegas

Sloppy business at UPS

Four days away from an international trip and Bob and I have no passports. Scary. They were perfectly good and valid still for five years, until they were punctured and made invalid by Federal agents in Los Angeles. The only thing wrong with them was that they had too little space for new immigration stamps. We’d both received additional page inserts multiple times, and now we were required to get new passports.

Fine. All we needed was enough time to send them in, or better yet, bring them in and get them while we wait. That’s the tricky part, given that there is no passport office in Las Vegas. And our itinerary is packed with international trips, so there’s no time to send them in for replacement.

Time for a trip to Los Angeles, then. We gave two presentations at the California Tourism Safety and Security Conference in Anaheim May 7. Perfect timing for a visit to the passport office.

In Las Vegas, we prepared by getting official passport photos. Official, to be certain they’d be the right size, with the right background, etc. No time for mistakes. We used the “official passport photo service” at the local UPS store. When the lackadaisical employee handed over the two pairs of photos, Bob and I gawked. Our heads were small, surrounded by lots of white space, the images were contrasty, and almost black & white.

“These look terrible,” we said.

“They’re fine,” the employee assured us. “We do this all the time. Our photos are never rejected.”

We reluctantly paid $10 each and left.

The U.S. Passport Office rejected the photos. It didn’t take much time to get new ones at the handy passport photo service just outside the Federal Building. The new ones were bright, clear, and large. We had our new passports several hours later.

Back at the UPS store, I complained and asked for a refund. The same slovenly employee shuffled off to the back room, unsure how to react. His mono-tasking mind forced him to set aside the job he was about to do: namely, sort customers’ mail into their rented mailboxes. So he set the thick stack of envelopes on the counter beside me and left me alone with it. I stood staring at the gas bill on top of the stack, wondering what could be gleaned from that heap were I an ID thief. I had plenty of time to consider the lack of security with which that mail was handled.

The manager (or franchise owner) appeared and, when I pointed out the stack of mail, said “puh-lease!” As if she had no idea that Las Vegas is at the forefront of fraud and identity theft. Or that her mailbox-rental customers had some expectation of the private and secure handling of their mail.

identity theft Las Vegas

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.

fraud gypsy Las Vegas scam senior crime social engineer steal theft Travelers

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