What to Do After You've Been Pickpocketed

Written by Scotty (AI assistant), based on Scott Eaton’s experiences, philosophy, and own words.

Near the Plaza de Armas in Santiago, Chile, a woman walked up behind me and squirted something wet on the back of my neck. Then she started yelling “Ave! Ave!” (Bird! Bird!) and wiping at the back of my neck with a handkerchief, very helpfully cleaning off the bird’s apparently massive guano bomb. Her partner appeared instantly to help on my back. Everything was happening fast. Finally my brain caught up. “All is not well.” I wheeled around in time to see the man hiding my money inside a folded travel brochure. I reached over his shoulder, grabbed the whole packet, and they jumped into a taxi that just happened to be idling at the curb. Two policemen casually continued their rounds toward me, unaware.

That one I won. Most of the time you don’t. A skilled pickpocket’s hand is so deft you won’t know your money is gone until you reach for it. Even then, you’ll usually think you spent it and forgot.

So this article assumes the worst case. You’ve been picked. You know it. The hand is gone, the wallet is gone. Now what?

The answer is a sequence I’ve worked out over decades of carrying cash in places where carrying cash is its own problem. It is the natural follow-up to my system for hiding money while traveling: that piece taught you how to set the trap. This one is what you do when the trap goes off.

Forgive the First Thirty Seconds

The first reaction is almost always wrong. Anger, embarrassment, the urge to chase, the urge to confront the crowd, the urge to slap your own pockets in panic while still standing where it happened.

Do none of that. Or rather, do it for about ten seconds, get it out of your system, and then start the sequence.

The thief is already gone. The crowd is not your friend right now. The street is not where decisions get made. Move.

Step 1: Get Somewhere Safe

“Safe” does not mean a police station, not first. Safe means out of sight of the person who just picked you, off the open street, and somewhere semi-private where you can stop, breathe, and think.

A hostel room is best. A café table in the back is fine. A museum restroom is excellent. A hotel lobby with a couch works. A shop where you can browse for two minutes without being hustled is acceptable in a pinch.

Privacy is the point. The next four steps tap into the layers from my hidden-money system, and every one of those layers depends on no one ever watching you reach for it.

Do this on a sidewalk where the same partner can still see you, and you have just published a map of where the rest of your cash lives.

That is worse than the original theft.

I get back to my hostel as quickly as I reasonably can. If the hostel is too far, the nearest secure hostel or museum will do.

Step 2: Inventory, Slowly

Once you are somewhere safe, find out what is actually gone. This sounds obvious. It is not. Panic makes you stupid about your own pockets.

Empty everything, in order. Front pocket, back pocket, jacket pockets, money belt, hat, sock split, shoe stash, daypack, luggage. Lay it on a bed or a table. The full inventory of the system is what tells you whether you lost twenty dollars of daily cash or whether they got something deeper.

If the system worked, the only thing missing is what was in your front pocket. The decoy. Exactly what it was there for.

Step 3: Pull the Backup

Now you reach into the backup. Money belt, jacket pocket, sock, shoe, whichever layer is nearest and quietest. Pull out enough to replace the decoy and a little more. Not the whole stash. Just the working amount for the next day or two.

This is where the system pays for itself. If the decoy held a modest amount, that is what you lost. Nothing more. If your cards are still in the money belt and your passport is still on you, you are not actually in trouble. You are inconvenienced.

Rick Steves makes the same point in his money belt guide: the belt is “deep storage,” not a working wallet, and you tuck it back in after every retrieval. The implication for refreshing the decoy is to do it where no one can watch you reach in. A bathroom stall. A changing room. A hostel room with the door shut. Never at a café table where the windows face the street. Never in a museum hallway where someone can clock the location of your money belt as you pull it out.

If you want to see the actual rig, here is a short walkthrough of my own modified version on the Scott’s Travels channel.

If you skip this rule and do the refresh in public, you have just turned the same pickpocket’s accomplice into a return customer.

Step 4: Refresh the Decoy

This is the step that most travelers, even experienced ones, do not think to do. It is the difference between a recovered trip and a still-twitchy one.

Restock the front pocket. Use the same denominations you carried before. Some small bills, one mid-size, change rattling around. Make it look exactly like what was just taken. The point of the decoy was never the money. The point of the decoy was to be a believable target. If you walk out of the bathroom with an obviously empty front pocket and your hand hovering protectively over your hip where the money belt is, you have just signaled the next opportunist that all your remaining cash is now consolidated in one place on your body. That is the opposite of what your system is supposed to do.

The refreshed decoy resets the picture. You look the same, you walk the same. The next person who tries you gets the same modest amount and runs, and your real money is still where it has always been.

Step 5: The Scene (Optional, But Worth Considering)

Sometimes, especially in a crowded area where the same crew works the same intersection day after day, it is useful to stage a small scene before you walk back into the open. Not at the moment of the theft, at the moment you re-enter the area after you’ve already done Steps 1 through 4.

I act helpless. I pat my pockets in obvious distress. I say something out loud, in the rough direction of the crowd, like “Oh no, my wallet, please” with appropriate face. To anyone watching, including the partner who is probably still in line of sight, I am the perfect picture of a tourist who has been completely cleaned out and is calling it a day.

What I am actually doing is telling every set of eyes in that plaza that I am no longer worth a second attempt. The pickpocket’s economic model depends on identifying soft targets, and a target who has just been hit and is visibly broken is the worst possible second pick. They move on.

This is the “act scared, sniffle” move from my harsh-crime piece, run in reverse. There, when the threat is direct, I wrote that the right move is to:

act scared, sniffle, if you can (because you are scared & they expect it) … with tears & fear in your eyes.

After a pickpocket, the same performance works the other way. You are not avoiding a confrontation, you are advertising the end of one. The crowd reads it the same way: this one is done. I’ve called the louder cousin of this “Academy Award winning” on the soft-crime side, where a boisterous laugh chases off a different kind of scammer. Same instinct, different application.

If you are leaving the city the same day, skip this step. It is only worth doing if the area still has hold of your itinerary.

Step 6: Cards, Phone, Passport

Now the boring part. Credit and debit cards. If they got a card, freeze it from your bank app first. Most US banks support instant freeze without canceling, which buys you a day to look harder before you commit to a replacement. If a freeze is not available, call the number on the back of the spare card in your money belt. (You did write that number down or keep a card photo in your encrypted notes, right? You will next time.)

Phone. If they got your phone, use a hostel computer or a friend’s device to log into your iCloud or Google account, mark the device as lost, and wipe it. Do not skip the wipe even if the phone is locked. A pickpocket who knows how to pick a pocket also knows people who know how to get past a screen lock.

Passport. If they got the passport, it is a bigger problem but not a catastrophe. Find the nearest US embassy or consulate, take a photo ID and any copy of the missing passport you saved (you saved one, right?), and follow the State Department’s lost-or-stolen passport procedure. A replacement is usually issued the next business day. A police report helps; it is not strictly required for the passport replacement, but you will want one anyway for the cards and insurance.

Step 7: The Police Report

File one. Not because the police will find your wallet, they will not. File it because the police report is the document that lets your travel insurance pay you back, lets the embassy issue you a replacement passport, and sometimes lets a credit card issuer waive the few small charges the thief got through before the freeze.

In most countries, walk into the nearest police station, ask for a written report, describe the theft as factually as you can, and keep the stamped copy. Some major tourist cities now have a dedicated tourist-police kiosk that handles this in English. They are not solving a crime, they are issuing a document. Treat the visit that way and it is short.

What the System Buys You

If you read the hidden-money piece, you already know how this ends. The system is not a fortress. It is the calm that comes from knowing the trip can absorb a bad twenty minutes.

I have been targeted. The bird-poop scam in Santiago is the one I caught in the act. The ones I didn’t catch are, by definition, the ones I’ll never know about. Either way, the answer was the same. The decoy did what it was built to do. The trip kept going. The Tilley hat still had its bills tucked into the inside seam, the crotch pocket still had a few hundred dollars, and the next day I was walking a different plaza with the same small wad of cash in my front pocket, ready to be taken again.

That is what backup is for. Not so that nothing bad ever happens, so that when something does, you have already decided what you are going to do, and you go do it, and you keep traveling.

That is the whole point.