It is Saturday afternoon and hundreds of tourists have come to snap selfies in front of Big Ben and to admire Westminster Abbey...
It is Saturday afternoon and hundreds of tourists have come to snap selfies in front of Big Ben and to admire Westminster Abbey.
Suddenly, as bold as brass, the man reaches forward, opens the flap of the handbag and darts his hand into it, not once, not twice, but three times – all while walking behind the victim. It could not be clearer: he is trying to steal something from the bag. He claims to have videoed 23 individuals over two days in August. When he posted his footage online, it went viral.The Mail's alarm at the scale of the problem was – to be frank – mingled with a little scepticism about whether there really were so many crooks on the streets of London. And so we invited him back to spend an afternoon watching him in action. Sure enough, we'd only been going 20 minutes when he spotted his first attempted snatch.
'Holding a phone on the street, carrying a laptop in a bag, listening to music on an expensive pair of headphones, have all become part of our daily routine,' says Danny Shaw, a policing expert. The number of tourists visiting the capital has surged over the past year – overtaking pre-pandemic levels – and many of them carry not just pricey phones but also a lot of cash. 'Asian people are the number-one target because they don't like credit cards. They come over here with lots of cash,' says van Gastel.
Van Gastel's shouting outside Westminster Abbey alerted a security guard who came to inspect the commotion – but instead of making any attempt to apprehend the pickpockets, he told van Gastel to keep the noise down! Another telltale sign, he says, is a pashmina or oversized scarf. 'When they want to open a zip, they use their scarf to hide their hands. Nobody can see it – their hands are underneath.'
Just ten minutes later, as we walk towards Buckingham Palace, it starts to rain and a number of tourists put up their brollies. The women, like the Westminster Abbey pair, nonchalantly walk away, not denying anything. Again, neither the police nor a Palace security guard is near enough to stop them. We continue to patrol the area around Buckingham Palace and, before long, he spots two smartly dressed women who, he insists, are displaying all the telltale body language of pickpockets. Both look smart, one has a Goyard tote bag – a £3,000 accessory from a Paris designer – over her shoulder.
The hollering, however, has worked for once. A constable patrolling 100 yards away, hears the commotion and calls for back-up. We only discover this a few minutes later when we see four officers questioning the women.
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