On Jun 13, 6:41 am, "note.boy" wrote:
"PC" wrote in message
...

Rome has a reputation for being rife with pickpockets as visitors are so
overcome by the place they are not as careful as the might normally be, my
brother in law had a folded map in his back pocket that he replaced each
time it was stolen, he was a victim 3 times as the thieves must have
presumed the map to be a wallet holding cash. Billy

Yeah, I can believe it of Rome based on my experiences there. I never
had my pocket picked, but I saw two pickpocket-related incidents.

The first was at the Colosseum. A man (American, judging from the
accent) was holding a woman by the arm and yelling for the police,
saying he had caught her reaching into a bag he was carrying. The
woman was upset-looking and muttered "mistake, mistake" and a few
other words in English. I don't think she was fluent in English, but
I think she was claiming that she had been next to the man, tried to
reach into her purse, and ended up with her hand in his bag by
mistake. I didn't stick around to see how it turned out once the
police showed up.

The second incident happened on the bus. (I later learned from a
guidebook that that particular bus line is notorious for
pickpockets.) At one stop, two women dressed in Gypsy fashion boarded
simultaneously, one at the front door and one at the back. One had a
baby and was carrying a bottle. They looked around at their fellow
passengers quite a bit, then got off at the next stop at the same
time. As the bus pulled away, I saw the one with a baby bottle take a
sip of its contents herself (I'm guessing it wasn't filled with
formula.) The two were so easy to spot, I kind of wonder if they
weren't part of a larger ploy: Put two obvious decoy pickpockets on
board, so that passengers instinctively check their wallets, thus
revealing their location to the better-disguised real pickpocket.
Once the decoys leave, the other passengers relax, and the real
pickpocket can go to work. Or maybe I'm being too suspicious there?

My strategy to avoid pickpockets was to always use a cloth money
belt. I always kept my passport, credit cards, and large denomination
cash in the money belt, which can go in front between my shirt and
pants. I tend to notice if someone is reaching down the front of my
pants :0 I kept a few small notes and coins in my front pockets, and
nothing at all in the back pockets. I recommend this strategy to
travelleres in Europe and anywhere else that pickpockets are likely.

-Robert A. DeRose, Jr.