By Howard Portnoy
You travel halfway around the world, to Thailand, and you want to come back with memories. But not exactly the memories the unidentified woman in the picture below returned with.
If asked, she will tell you that those memories include the painful reality of something she didn’t return with — her wristwatch.
The woman, who was on vacation with her boyfriend (he snapped the picture), chanced upon two adorable little girls clad in traditional garb outside a temple in Chiang Mai and decided to pose for a souvenir photo with them:
The snapshot looks harmelss enough until you study it closely — as the couple did upon returning home. It is only then that you notice that the little angel on the right is deftly unstrapping the band of the woman’s watch!
The couple discovered after the boyfriend/photographer posted the image to Reddit that they were not the first tourists to be taken in by this pair of pint-sized con artists and thieves.
The Daily Mail notes:
One Reddit user said the girls must be the ‘two most popular child thieves in all of Asia’, while another observed there were around six girls in the same outfit and guessed they could be an ‘organised gang’.
One tourist said he must have dodged a bullet as he made a last minute decision not to have a photograph with the pair.
‘Holy c**p! I was tempted to ask for a photo with them when we saw them at the temple but didn’t want to be ‘that tourist’ and was also worried that their momager who was lingering around might scream at me for money if I went near them.’
Some commented on what they called the girls’ technique, noting they touched their target in several places ‘so she didn’t notice her watch being snatched’.
‘Notice how the thief is touching her hand in several places? It’s a pickpocket technique so that the mark gets accustomed to being touched by the thief and stops registering all of the touches.’
