Travel Tales: Pickpockets & Other Thieves is the next book in the True Travel Tales series of very scary travel stories of pickpocketing and theft in travel. If you are pickpocketed or robbed we hope you manage to escape in your travels with only minor consequences. This book is a collection of the fearful and potentially dangerous sorts of things that can and do happen to travelers on occasion, but mostly these will not happen to you. You’ll read examples of the real, raw fear and very unsettling occasions that may pop up now and again in your travels. This book includes true tales of the variety of robberies, thefts, assaults, scams, some cons games, and even close calls of kidnappings (yes… a form of theft, after all). Also included are tales of successes and failures in connection with all sorts of travel situations including chases, foiled kidnappings, bandits, sexual harassment and attacks, roadblocks, scary places, trips from hell, borders, and police, hitchhiking, international spying, smuggling, intrigue, and sometimes merely being in the wrong places at the wrong times. Also included is, say you just happened to catch a pickpocket. What then? What in the world do you do with the pickpocket? This book is the place to read about the accounts of the dangers and mishaps of others. And you’ll gain a healthier respect for what it is like to experience the true dangers and risks of travel and adventure. And with a better knowledge and respect of travel and its potential dangers and risks, hopefully, you’ll gain a better sense of safety, security, enjoyment, and appreciation of your travels. Pickpockets & Other Thieves includes many examples of bad things that happen on occasion to travelers despite their best efforts to avoid such things. But bad things DO happen on occasion, and the best thing to do is, of course, to avoid them in the first place. But if we cannot, we should at least do our best to escape them. Again, while there’s no easy, simple miracle list of failsafe strategies for always staying safe and secure in dangerous situations that may arise, there are, nevertheless, meaningful takeaway strategies from the many examples presented in this book that will enable you to better enhance your personal safety and security and reduce the risks of potentially dangerous outcomes in travel. While many of the tales in this book are not strictly about life and death situations surrounding travel, many are about difficult, embarrassing, and otherwise annoying nuisances that we all would do well to better avoid and do without. The scope and variety of pickpocketing and thievery in this book may surprise you. And some would never likely even occur to you. And, indeed such misadventures may never happen to you, but after reading about such things in this book, it should at least give you pause – who knows? maybe you’ll never suffer the indignity and inconvenience of a pickpocketing event, other thefts, cons, or scams after all. Sure, you’ll read stories in the True Travel Tales book series that will alert you to situations that may never even occur to you. But if you avoid even one new travel danger that you might never have even thought of by reading these books, then I’ll have accomplished a very useful purpose.