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Mugging and Robbery. Ten or
fifteen years ago, muggings in Spain were almost always carried
out by lone or pairs of drug addicts looking to finance their
next fix, and it was not uncommon for their victims to give
them money more out of pity than fear. But in recent years,
gangs of various nationalities have begun to operate, often
acting in near military style, unobtrusively surrounding their
target before pressing in quickly to wrest his property from
him, sometimes with great violence. Such gangs will attack
even in very public areas like the Gran Via, Puerta del Sol,
Plaza Mayor or the Retiro in Madrid or the Ramblas in Barcelona
(and at the time of writing, the Foreign Office is urging
special care in the Montjuic quarter of Barcelona). They have
mugged so many Japanese tourists, especially, that few visitors
of that nationality now come to Madrid, and the US State Department
says that "Asian Americans are at particular risk."
A classic form of robbery in Spain
is bag-snatching carried out by the passenger of a moving
motorcycle, and it is not unknown for the same kind of robbery
to be carried out from a car. This seems to be less common
than before, but it can be extremely dangerous for the victim,
who may be knocked or pulled over, so avoid having your camera
or bag dangling temptingly within reach of the road. If you
cannot remember to switch shoulders to keep it on the side
away from the traffic, wear it across your chest (though I
must point out that this has its risks as well).
Motorists. If you are driving
in Spain, it is much more likely that your car will be robbed
than stolen. In fact, if it is a foreign or rented vehicle,
it will almost inevitably be broken into, so never leave anything
of the slightest worth in it (Spanish drivers have long had
the custom of carrying even their car radios with them when
they leave their vehicles), and try to keep it tidy: if you
leave things lying around, thieves will think there might
be more interesting articles underneath them. Be leery of
seemingly helpful fellow drivers, as well. A common trick
is to convince you to pull over on the pretext that your vehicle
has a problem, then engage you in conversation while the driver's
accomplices are robbing your caravan or even the boot of your
car.
Crowded Places. Pickpockets
are at their most comfortable in a crowd and it is impossible
for you to avoid all such situations, so be especially careful
in places like the Metro. Light-fingered Spaniards, often
working in teams, have a number of tricks, verging on scams,
some of which are almost hallowed traditions. In one very
common ploy, you will feel a tug on your sleeve from a passerby
who will point out a stain you have on your coat or jacket,
which he or she will then help you to clean, probably with
the flurried assistance of another, apparently unrelated passerby.
They will even assist you in removing your coat or jacket,
so helpful are they. Of course, the stain was only a soap
solution deliberately sprayed on to you, and when your Samaritans
have finished and disappeared, you will find that your bags
and/or pockets have been emptied (whether or not you were
naive enough to let them take your coat off).
Scams. If the above is really
just ornamented pickpocketing, actual scams are by no means
rare, indeed there is a long tradition of them in Spain, where
they are considered to fall within the category of the picaresco,
even slightly romantic. If you do not speak good Spanish,
you are to a certain extent protected from many of them, unless
you are actually targeted, as is the case with the "lottery
scam" the US State Department is currently warning against.
This is an updated version of one of the most venerable of
Spanish scams, known as the "tocomocho,"
where the victim is duped into thinking he has won a lottery
prize or has the opportunity to acquire a ticket which has
won a prize (for much less than the amount of the prize, you
get the idea). Other classic scams (timos in Spanish)
are the timo de los trileros, the Spanish version of
the pea-under-the-cup game, where you always win until you
lose your shirt; the timo de la estampita, where you
are led to believe that a mentally handicapped person will
sell you a large number of banknotes for a much smaller amount
(the banknotes are actually pieces of newspaper); and the
timo del nazareno, where an apparently respectable
merchant or company wins the confidence of suppliers by religiously
paying his/its bills, until the day he/it makes and receives
an order which is much larger than usual, whereupon he and
the goods will disappear from the face of the earth. Nazarenos
are those Klu-Klux-Klan-like figures that make up Spanish
Easter processions and the timo del nazareno gets its
name from the long bank queues that form of creditors vainly
trying to cash in their worthless letters of credit and IOUs.
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