Storyline: Home to home westward
It was very slick, very well-designed and POOF, my phone was gone. We know who did it, how they did it, and that we’ll never prove it or get the phone back.
It was our second full day in Bangkok and we felt that we were starting to get our bearings. The details of the day are in the previous post, so let’s just say that we were hot, tired and in need of shade along with something to eat and drink. After our late afternoon time at the beautiful and busy – did I mention hot? – Wat Arun (Temple of Dawn), we had to get across the Chao Phraya River to reach the cafés on the east bank. The 5-minute ferry ride would cost us 4 baht, about $1 each. We paid the fare and walked on to the ferry. You could probably fit more than 200 people onto its covered deck, but there were only 20 or so when we boarded. Given Diana’s susceptibility to motion sickness, I aimed for a bench on the centerline of the boat, and pulled my phone out of its velcroed pocket to take a photo. Diana preferred to be able to take pictures from the rail, so we moved there.
As we sat down, a woman’s voice called, “Woo, can I have a picture with you?”, as she hurried from the other side of the boat and squeezed in between us. “I’m from the Philippines”, she exclaimed. I dropped my phone into my pocket, forgetting to slide it into the inner Velcro pouch, and a couple of snaps were taken by her partner from across the deck. Up she got, with a “Thank you. Have a great visit”, and went back to her side of the vessel. Diana noticed that she went towards a different man on the other side and seemed to be talking to him. She suggested that I go and have my picture taken with the woman, so I walked across the deck and attempted to sit next to her for a snap. Meanwhile Diana noticed some activities – the woman told the man she touched before to leave (later we’d realize that she didn’t want him in the photo) and told a tour guide sitting in the same row next to them – “You can stay”. Walking back across the deck, I reached into my pocket to get my phone and take a photo…and the phone had disappeared. It was that quick, that simple, and all our attempts to protect our valuables were gone in that instant.
I felt all my pockets – and there are many, including hidden ones, in my travelling trousers. Nothing. I looked on the deck below the bench. Nothing. I looked at the woman who had come to be photographed with us. She wasn’t watching us. I went to her side of the deck to check there. Nothing, and she pretended to look around too. Then a tour guide approached me to ask what was wrong. She passed my concerns to a crew member, who pretty much shrugged it off. Then she went to talk to our ‘suspect’. After a few minutes, she beckoned me over. The woman wanted to show me a photograph that showed my cap in my right hand when the picture was taken. “See. No phone”. Well, I’m left-handed so that argument was a non-starter. Realising that any further interaction would get me nowhere, I gave up.
Fortunately, I never allow phones or computers to store passwords, or in most cases, login IDs. This has been very inconvenient at times when I have had trouble recalling an ID or password for a particular site, but it does provide an extra layer of security at times like this. Of course, there is a wealth of information in stored emails for an enterprising hacker…itineraries, booking confirmations, etc. But there was nothing much we could do about those other than hope that the phone would remain locked. And fortunately, I always lock the phone as I put it into my pocket, so the risk of loss of data was low, but still there.
We disembarked from the ferry, still very hot and thirsty, and stopped in a café for a drink. Then hurried back through Chinatown to the MRT, and back to the apartment where the real damage control began. I set up the phone to automatically erase everything should it ever reconnect to the internet, then Diana and I both set about changing e-mail passwords so that any further emails would not reach the phone, and nobody could send emails from it. I also informed the local phone carrier that the phone was stolen: this in case anything nefarious were to be done with it in the future…my passport was used to activate it.
We are still in the process of recovering my Apple account. I had been carefully updating the recovery phone numbers when we bought sim cards in each country, but this didn’t help because the previous countries’ sim cards had expired or did not work in Thailand, so I had to use our host’s number to begin the recovery process. That was fine to start with, but Apple then informed me that it would take up to a week for the process to be completed, after which our recovery phone number would be contacted with instructions to complete the process. And our hosts were leaving on vacation the next day, to another country, and they would be getting a tourist sim there. We gave up on the account recovery at that point and started the process again once we returned home. A couple of weeks later.
It doesn’t matter how careful you think you are; you can be targeted into a moment of inattention and then it’s too late. The people who are after you are professionals and work in teams. And they are much more alert than a couple of tired, hungry, thirsty and sweaty tourists. We’ll be even more alert going forward, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one day when it’s obvious to the pros that our defenses are down, we won’t be targeted again.
Diana:
Reconstructing the events later that evening, I’d say that they had their eyes on us from the moment we boarded the ferry. Alex was using his phone for photos, because my camera was secured in the backpack, and that day we hadn’t taken Alex’s camera – we were not going to go far (see previous post on this). She forcefully sat between us, almost separating us and perhaps the phone was gone at that very moment. It didn’t matter if we said yes or no to her “Can I take a photo with you”. This was only a “justification” of a strange behaviour, to distract and to gain some time. By the time she sat next to her “partner”, the phone had probably changed a few hands and left the boat. The man she did not want in the picture was probably more at risk if seen on a photo with such an accusation.
The major loss is not the phone itself, but all the videos of our 3 months trip, including The Ghan expedition. Luckily, our photos were downloaded on a laptop almost every evening, but the phone was used mostly for videos which were not regularly downloaded.
All in all, a nice welcome to Bangkok…but it could have happened anywhere.
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