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Criminals Among Us
Err Travel · December 21, 1999

I'm just back from Las Vegas after participating in the annual conference of the American Society for Industrial Security.

The membership of ASIS is divided between corporate security directors whose responsibility it is to protect their companies' "assets" and vendors that supply the services and products to fulfill that responsibility.

In future columns, I'll have more to say about the tone of the conference and about the exhibited products and services that are available to corporate security departments. But for now, I want to share with you my observations of the behavior of the people attending the conference.

What better group of travelers for me to observe than people who are in the security business? And what better place to watch them than in Las Vegas!

Keep in mind that most of the attendees would have made poor victims. They seemed to be aware of their surroundings and exercised caution inside and outside of the convention hall. But there were some exceptions who stood out as easy pickin's for any would-be robber.

Here are my impressions of how these few leading security professionals made themselves vulnerable to crime.

Sporting a sign: We got a lot of stuff when we arrived at the conference: program directories, magazines, luncheon and event tickets, and miscellaneous flyers. To help us pack this stuff around, we were given a nifty zippered bag with the conference logo on one side and ADT's logo on the other. A nice way to tote around conference materials that we were likely to accumulate.

These identical, logoed bags immediately identified each of us as an attendee at this particular conference. Any criminal working the conference would know that all he needed was just a little general information about the convention and a way to identify its attendees. With that information, he could easily meld into the gaggle of out-of-towners, being that much closer to relieving them of some of their property

Advice: Carry convention goodies in an unmarked bag.

Wearing a badge: Along the same lines as the bag, each attendee was required to wear a name badge to be admitted to the seminar and exhibit areas -- standard procedure for large conferences. This is also helpful to those of us who don't know or can't remember the names of our fellow attendees. But these badges are even better for criminals who can learn our names, company affiliations, and home towns -- just the kind of information clever crooks use to get their victims to disclose way too much information about themselves and about their plans.

Advice: Loose the badge whenever you leave the conference site.

Waxing wirelessly: Cell phones and beepers are haute couture for the corporate security set. I found people everywhere talking on their cell phones or checking their beepers. That's not to say that these people were discussing business or retrieving company messages. Indeed, they were just as likely to be reserving tee times or checking baseball scores. The corporate sheriffs of the New West have replaced their Smith and Wesson's with Nokias and their Colts with Motorolas.

With a phone strapped to one hip and a beeper snapped onto the other, these people looked like corporate gunslingers heading for the Y2K Corral.

Advice: Phones and pagers mark their users as potentially lucrative targets. And preoccupation in conversation and message retrieval hampers one's ability to take note of others lurking nearby. Make calls and check messages in some protected environment -- i.e., not on the street or in open public areas.

I do not know if any of the 17,000 attendees at the conference were robbed by two-armed bandits while in Las Vegas, but I do know that criminals were among us. A chat with an insider working in the convention bookstore, for instance, told me that shrinkage there was "not zero."

Dr. Terry Riley is a psychologist and travel security authority. His column appears on Saturdays. He is author of the popular book Travel Can Be Murder. Visit his site at http://www.appliedpsychology.com or e-mail him at riley@appliedpsychology.com.