Why thieves prefer black bags when stealing luggage at airports
byWhy Thieves Prefer Black Bags Yeah, this story’s everywhere, about the Phoenix couple who made a living stealing luggage off the airport carousel. Police…
Thieves
Crime in Port Moresby, PNG
byAfter further research, I feel compelled to write a little more about Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. For all the pretty pictures in my…
Knock-out gas on overnight trains
byAtul and Smriti Shah experienced it first-hand. “It happened during the night,” they concluded. “The entire compartment was sprayed with some sort of gas…
Theft on overnight trains
byOvernight train travel requires watchfulness. Stations can be seedy. They’re open and available to anyone, with or without tickets. They attract a varied population…
Central and East European Train Crime
byRailway mafia groups fight over territory along the thousands of kilometers of track across Central & Eastern Europe. The most lucrative connections are those…
Pickpocket heaven at Oktoberfest
byPsychology is an integral part of a good cannon’s skill-set. He must be able to read the mark. More than one good pickpocket has…
Oktoberfest: Breasts, big beers, and Bavarian barf
byCalled in to pickpocket goodies from the massive Munich Oktoberfest crowd, Bob and I, just back from Japan to do a show for Monsanto…
Hotel safe theft
byWhat would you do if you opened the safe behind the hotel manager’s desk and found your passports gone? One woman took creative action….
How Bernanke’s ID thieves did it
byAnna Bernanke hung her purse on the back of a chair at Starbucks. It was stolen and, soon after, she and Ben became victims…
A typical ATM skimmer scam
byA reader wrote of an ATM experience which, soon after, led to $9,000 in fraudulent withdrawals. He was abroad, but this happens at ATMs…
The flower gift lift—Part 3 of 3
byThe Offer of a Flower is a Foil for Filching Palma de Mallorca, Spain— Bob and I trailed a trio of young women through…
The flower gift lift—Part 2 of 3
byPalma de Mallorca, Spain— Thirty to forty women practice this form of filching every day in Palma. They linger where the tourists are: around…
The flower gift lift
byPickpockets with flowers Palma de Mallorca, Spain— She looks like your grandmother—possibly even your great-grandmother. With a gap-toothed smile, she offers you a single…
Shoulder-surfers and pseudo-cops in Sweden
byI want to wail even in Sweden, because the country has long been perceived as enjoying a relatively low crime rate. And it did….
Fake police, aka Pseudo-Cops
byIn Bangkok, seemingly corrupt police are extorting large sums from foreign visitors. In South Africa, pseudo-cops are stopping drivers and pedestrians, requesting wallets in…
Bangkok airport scam and fake police
byWe good citizens are trained from an early age to respect authority. It’s not easy to ask a uniformed policeman for identification, or even…
High-tech identity theft today
by…¢ Identity theft is now the number one crime in the world. …¢ Las Vegas is number one in the U.S. for ID theft;…
Skimmers for credit card fraud
byA little background, as reference for my next post: A skimmer is a battery-operated device smaller than a deck of cards with a slot…
ID theft buffet
byA former mortgage broker put 40 boxes of customers’ personal information into a Las Vegas dumpster. It was December 2006, but we all knew…
Street crime in Lisbon
byThieves are thick on Lisbon’s two main tourist trams, 15 and 28. Within five minutes of arriving at a tram stop for #28, we’d…
Hotel security in the hands of housekeeping staff
byLoot ‘n scoot: Through my police friends, I learned of another devious M.O. resulting in theft from hotel rooms. The thief simply poses as…
Street crime in Buenos Aires
byWhen my friend, Stephen Kane, described what he witnessed on a recent afternoon in Buenos Aires, I begged him to write it down for…
Scams at restaurant tables
byA restaurant table is a good place to be had. The latest in low-tech scams happened last month in Hoboken, NJ, when a man…
Social engineering—is it time to curtail trust?
byA couple of scumbags have been casing neighborhoods in Las Vegas, preying on elders. They chat up residents, pretending to be a former resident…
Purse stolen off lap at restaurant
byShould Have Left it in the Hotel—Gisela and Ludvig Horst checked into their Barcelona hotel and immediately got into an argument. Gisela did not…
Thieves in airports
bySo you’ve made it through security. Does that mean you’re in a secure area? Not secure enough to relax your attention. Thieves have been…
Confessions of an airport thief
byKharem’s Lucky Haul Kharem, a pickpocket in Spain, sometimes chooses Barcelona’s airport over the rich pickings of the city. When Bob and I again…
Airport danger and the strategist thief
by“Did you know you’re wearing mismatched shoes?” a well-dressed Englishman said to our friend, Brooks, at London’s Heathrow airport one day. Brooks was talking…
At large in Rome
byWe spent some time observing this woman in Rome. She carried a child in a sling and walked with another woman. We thought we…
Taxi trickery
byAfter an eventful overnight train journey we were disgorged into a very foreign Sunday morning. Not a single sign in Prague’s main train terminal…