Stealing with Attention Manipulation

Watch master in action.

The psychology behind Attention Manipulation is that, everyone has limited cognitive resource. By adding extra signals and overloading the victim with sensation and thoughts, the victim cannot notice the steal under their nose (try this famous psychology test: selective attention).

The advantage of this technique is that you can probably get anything (high value items) you want if you are good at it, but the downside is that this is difficult to master and it creates a high profile interaction that is likely to have you remembered. There’s good news too, if you can’t do it alone, do it with teammates.

Some common tricks you can try:

• The Petition: go with a bunch of people with petitions in busy, touristy areas and ask tourists to sign. Steal their stuff while they are distracted.
• “Take my photo” and take their stuff.
• Fake police (Barcelona): Dress up as a fake police and ask tourists for their passport and wallets, take their cash, return the wallet, drive away while they are in shock. Aim for people traveling alone, those honest “good lads” and backpackers traveling alone at night.
• The shoving: do it at bus and train station, just shove people and rob them while they are shocked. Pick women and thin guys who don’t look like they can fight/bite.
• Group ambush: surround the victim with a bunch of people, a lot of unfamiliar faces all with action will overload one’s cognitive, and you take whatever you can.
• Fake clean up: be overly helpful and offer to clean them up because “a bird pooped on you”. You condition them to physical touch so you can steal stuff more easily.

Prevention Measures

You really can’t identify who’s who because they just look like normal people (even tourists), so basically when you are exposed to people you have to be on guard.

I think in general there are three steps you can do to prevent yourself from being pickpocketed, or to minimize the losses.

To prevent from being targeted in the first place, you should blend in, take precaution measures, and get familiar with their tactics.

Blending in

• American and Asian are often targeted because they tend to have more cash in their wallet. Therefore they should be extra careful.
• Don’t stop in the middle of the road to look at directions, it’s very conspicuous.
• Blend in with the outfits, keep it simple.
• Don’t travel around with suitcases and huge bags.
• Play it cool with the tourist attractions. The dreamy stare to is often a tell-tale sign.

Take precautions

• Don’t travel after dark
• Be extra aware at crowded places, such as popular bus routes, tourist attractions, beaches, museums.
• e.g. The 64 Bus in Rome is known as the “Pickpocket express”
• Trust your gut feelings
• Use common sense.

Familiar yourself with common pickpocketing techniques. Even reading this article once is going to help. Humans are extra-ordinary at pattern recognition, given that they are exposed to enough data.

• In general, be aware of people being overly close to you.
• Especially if they have something to cover their hand with (Paris pickpocket girl gang), such as a jacket hanging on their arm or a huge bag over their hand. They probably want to pickpocket you with “the shade” technique. This can be performed by a single thief or a group of people (with decoys).
• It’d be harder to notice being pickpocketed if the thief is interacting with you, attention manipulation is an art, and if the thief is really charismatic, you can easily fall victim to it. 
• As a rule of thumb, when you are interacting with strangers who approach you:

1. maintain distance with them
2. keep a hand on your belongings, especially if you are in a tourist attraction.

In case you are targeted, you can eliminate risks of losing valuables by bringing less stuffs, splitting the valuables and creating more frictions.

• Don’t bring valuables
• Look into your bag and take out anything you can’t lose before you go out
• Don’t keep things in your pockets
• Put valuables at the bottom of bags
• Split your cash

Create frictions: thieves have lots of targets, if your stuff cannot be easily stolen, they will give up quickly and move on, to not get caught.

• Use anti-theft bag
• Don’t make it look like it’s easy for them to steal/rob you.
• Sabotage their stealing experience (UX) by increasing the activation energy of accessing your personal belongings, such as putting a lock/ paper clip around zippers.
• Use bags with double inner pockets (zippers).
• Make it difficult for people to access your valuables, such as using double zippers etc.

If you are pickpocketed, spring to action and get help.

Retrieve the losses

• Check the nearest trash can to retrieve important documents (if they are in your stolen wallet).
• License and IDs are useless for thieves, most who stole wallets want cash and cards.

Getting help

• Scream “Help”, “Pickpocket” and “Police” in local language in public areas.

Notes

[1] I grew up in mainland China and Taiwan.

[2] Most of the time I don’t need to worry. Also while I’m on campus I get to leave my computer and stuff everywhere, because it is safe and most places are covered by surveillance cameras. And, yes, there is a trade-off.

[3] I grew up being the one taking care of my siblings from surrounding dangers, so perhaps there is some surviver bias here. Please take my conclusions prudently.