Thieves Strategies
 

Hi,

After what saddly happened to Katrina and Peter (sincerest condolances to their families and friends). It would be a good idea to share our stories with thieves that we encontered on the road. If it could just help one person to get out a bad situation. It would be all worth it.


When I was in Santa Cruz (Bolivia), 4 Bolivians tried to kidnapped with a car: I was walking in the city and a guy to me to ask directions to go to a plaza. I said sure. As I was helping to help him finding the place on his map, I saw that he was not reacting anymore to what I was saying and he was looking at the street. I found that strange. As I turned around to look in the same direction as him: A car had just stopped behind me. There was 3 big guys inside (200lbs like). One of them opened the door and shooted "Police and showed a police card". I was between the car and the guy outside. It didn't take long for a bell to ring in my head: Get out of here!!!. So I ran away from the car and shouted to them : Goodbye theives!!! After I was away, then all the people in the street were telling me that they were thieves (Ladrone in spanish). Why they did not yell that from the beginning?

A similar scenario happened to me before in Bogota Columbia: Someone that looks local said to me that he was searching a place in the city. Then, another one with suit and tie came to us and said he was from the police. Then he gave the directions to the first guy to look nice. After that, the supposed police ask me to give him my passport. I said no 2 times to his requests. He became really mad. To know if he was a real Police, I just started to walk away a bit fast. The guy didn't do anything. A real police would have grab me so I would not escape. So I decided to have a bit of fun and took my camera and started to run after the theive while shooting pictures... It was cool to see him hiding his face while going away.

So in short, be on your guard when someone ask you direction and another person come in as the police.


Patrick

Scary.

I had a fake cop try and stop me in Pakistan, but it was so obvious he was just trying it on. I never felt threatened. Asking for ID, and studying it properly seems worthwhile.

As does positioning yourself against a wall.

A small point in addition - and please don't take this as useless nit picking - there should be an apostrophy of possession in the thread title after "thieves". Thus it becomes "thieves' strategies". Genuinely, it would have helped me make sense of the content better. And yes, I am getting old. It is starting to show. :)

Simon

Thieves
 

Good thread.

I think we should include preventive strategies. I called my credit card company, after reading Katrina and Peter's website, and was told there was no way to lower my daily withdrawal limit.

Good Idea
 

While your credit card company won't always lower your daily limit if you apply for a new card before you leave it will probably come to you with a lower limit to start.

Also your bank will lower your ATM limit. In fact my bank has done this without request. Instead they want to be contacted if you should decide to keep a higher limit.

Cheers
Riq

Tip
 

What I do is use a debit card to take money from ATMs and have a paralell account where I put my savings, so when I need cash I make a transfer via Internet from the master account to the one that has the debit card.
That way I only mantain 500 dlls. or so in the debit card.
I know it is maby more time consuming but it is safer, the thieves :confused1: will never know about the other account and they will think it is only 500 dlls what I have left for my trip. :thumbup:

Dough I have never been in need of testing it.



Humberto

They will need to get the PIN #. I think they will see all accounts with the bank. Go to an atm and try to get a balance from the savings acct, it usually shows up to allow balance inquiries and transfers.

I have a money market account with a mutual fund company linked to my bank checking account. I can then transfer whatever amount, via internet, I want to be available to the checking account, although it takes 3 days or so. Since they are seperate institutions, I don't think there would be any visibility from the atm card.

Yeah, that should work but if you have two bank accounts at one bank, eg savings and checking, I think they would both be accessible.

Also, Amex has a travel card that is some sort of prepaid system. I'm going to look into it.

I am immediately suspicious whenever a local actively approaches me for anything. It sucks to have to be like that but they've attempted to rob me 5 times so far on this trip, every time working in a team and using some type of distraction. But usually you can tell within a second if you're dealing with a legitimately curious person or a distractor.

For you guys who have travelled around different continents, how would you rate the thievery factor in Asia and Africa compared to Latin America?

Excellent thread! I used my Paypal account on my last trip to transfer money to my chequing account which i use for travelling. Like AndyT, this usually takes a few days, but as mentiones before, they require your PIN, so the question is: if you are detained, do you willingly give out your PIN to get out of the situation? And after the card is gone, it's pretty hard and time consuming to get a new one in most foreign countries, especially if its your main source of cash. I keep a cancelled credit and ATM card in my muggers wallet at all times for this purpose, hoping in a worse case situation it satisfies the thugs and gets them off my back.

Here's a non-bike (or S America) related one for you:

My mate & I had arrived in Tangiers (a few years ago), as we are walking to catch the train to Fez, a guy starts chatting to us on the platform and ends us sitting with us on the train. He is (aparently) a moroccan living in Madrid and is buying local goods to sell there. He is v helpfull about morocco and offers lots of useful advice on moroccan custons, where to go etc and even writes our names in arabic in our books. Once the train is moving, another guy looks in to our compartment and asks if there are any free seats. Again, chatting away fine, no problems.

We tell them we are heading to Fez and (this is where it starts) 1st guy says Fez is way too hot, not that great etc. He's going to Asilah where theres a local festival happening. 2nd guy is also going there to visit relatives (aparently). Anyhow, as we had no fixed plans and were getting on well with them, we opted to visit Asilah for a night and got off the train with them.

To cut a long story short, they got us into a guest house (which they were obviously affiliated with), then 1st guy was going to (you guessed it) the 'house of the Berbers' to buy stuff to sell. We went along to watch the 'master' at work only for me and my mate to be split up onto different floors of this 4 storey building and given the hard sell on carpets etc. Meantime, 2nd guy had gone off to pray! When we left and hadn't spent anything, the 1st guy was well pissed off as I assume he wasn't getting his cut from the Berbers. It aslo turned out that A) they weren't staying at our guest house- they buggered off but not before the bastards arranged to meet us later on and B) had taken our money (overcharged us) and paid the guesthouse woman for only one of us so we ended up in a shouting match on the roof the next day as she obviously knew them so we didn't pay her.

Anyway, there was a lot more to it than (drugs were produced etc) that but just wanted to share how easy it can be to put your trust into someone who initially appears helpful but potentially we could have gotten into a much worse situation which thankfully didn't happen. Unfortunatelly, it took a bit of time to trust anyone else there after that. We met some nice folk in Asilah later who told us those guys regularly worked the train line preying on backpackers freshly off the ferry in Tangiers.

We didn't have any more major hassles afterwards but that but I guess thats Morocco (or more specifically Tangiers) for you as the rest of Morocco was great.

(ps I know someone on here is bound say it was stupid to talk to or trust strangers etc but we don't consider ourselves to be nieve and if you don't trust or speak to anybody, well what kind of holiday are you going to have?)

Hope thats of some use to anyone.