In search of some good news last night, I called my youngest son, the policeman, who works in Madrid. I asked him if he was as overloaded with work as his older brother. He told me that thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, there has been a sharp drop in crime of 80%. Fortunately, not all coronavirus news is bad. One can only take so much gloom and doom.
As it turns out, quarantine and confinement also apply to thieves, swindlers, drug dealers, and other sundry crooks. Law-abiding citizens are not the only ones imprisoned at home. The houses and apartments of habitual criminals have also become their jail. Proof of this is that for fear of coronavirus infection, Spanish prisons are currently releasing certain inmates who have committed non-violent crimes so that they can be confined at home instead. Confinement is confinement.
At the Madrid airport where my son works, three of the terminals have been shut down. Air controllers have been furloughed. Airport shops are closed. Even though there are still a few planes flying in and out, Barajas is like ghost town. One of my son’s jobs is to patrol the terminal in plainclothes as though he were also a traveler and try to catch the suitcase snatchers, pickpockets, and various types of con artist that generally ply their trade there.
At the top of the hierarchy are the pickpockets, who regard themselves as aristocrats because their profession requires great skill, dexterity, and the sleight-of-hand of a magician. There used to be quite a few pickpockets in the airport. Many were Romanians, who made a good living because travelers always take money and credit cards with them. Since my son has been working there, he has come to recognize many of them and even know some by name because he has arrested them so frequently.
However, with three airport terminals closed, pickings are now much slimmer. Criminals are also feeling the economic crunch. Not surprisingly, the pickpockets have almost disappeared in the airport. The coronavirus has the effect of making so many things (even people) suddenly disappear.
Airport passengers (the few who can still travel) are now in less danger of having their money and baggage stolen. But where has the criminal elite of the airport gone? According to my son, the greener pastures are now the large supermarkets, which have become the new hotspots for crime because they are among the few places, apart from home, where people are still allowed to go.
Quite understandably, enterprising pickpockets, who have studied the market, have left the airport and migrated there in search of new victims. Nevertheless, the coronavirus has made the lives of everyone more difficult, and has not even spared the dishonest.
Thanks to the coronavirus, pickpockets and con artists in general must now address significant challenges and implement new strategies to achieve their goals.
First, they must plan their scope of action and choose their victim carefully, either inside the supermarket or outside in the line of people waiting to enter. Since everyone must stand two meters apart, both inside and outside, this means that the pickpocket must extract a wallet, purse, or credit card at quite a distance from the prospective victim. Simply having long arms is not sufficient for this purpose.
It is necessary to start up a conversation or fabricate an excuse that justifies accidental contact or less interpersonal distance, to propitiate a suitable context for extraction. Given the current level of social alarm, this is far from simple.
In the supermarket, it might be possible to accidentally brush against the victim in one of the aisles, but this would also cause apprehension. Closeness is no longer politically correct. Social distancing has made picking pockets so difficult that many of these non-violent criminals have had to recycle and invent new ways of stealing money from the gullible. After all, necessity is the mother of invention.
In one of these new scams, two medical professionals appear at the victim’s door dressed in gas masks, surgical gloves, and scrubs. Around their neck is an official badge of some sort, and they carry an insecticide sprayer, probably borrowed from the small farm of a relative. They show the person that answers the door a pseudo-legal document written in official gibberish that has a blurred official-looking stamp, probably fabricated with a wet sweet potato.
They solemnly inform the occupant/s that as part of a new campaign against the pandemic, they have been sent to disinfect all of the apartments in the building. However, during this operation, everyone in the apartment must remain in the hallway because the disinfectant can irritate eyes and nasal passages. In this way, they are allowed free access to the household and are able to take anything that looks even remotely valuable.
This scam has another variant that primarily targets the elderly. The fake doctors arrive at the door, and inform the occupants that science has recently discovered that all currency can be a focal point of infection. Therefore, it is necessary for them to test all the money in the house for possible contagion. Any infected currency must be confiscated. The gullible residents quickly run to get all of the money stored under the mattress and give it to the fake doctors.
The fake test consists of anything the scammers can devise, such as shining an ultraviolet light on the bills or or running them through a currency counting machine. Of course, the results show that a significant portion of the money is infected and thus has to be ‘confiscated’. They then give the owners a fake voucher for the confiscated bills and coins as well as the address of the fake office where they can supposedly recover the disinfected bills in ten days. The scammers then depart, usually a few hundred euros richer.
Nevertheless, these scams, though often successful, involve a certain level of risk. The victims may not be as dumb as they appear to be. They might have read about the scam in the newspaper or heard about it on the radio. They might call the police. And, of course, no one wants to go to jail in times of coronavirus. Social distancing is difficult in overcrowded cells, and the coronavirus has not spared either prison inmates or prison guards.
So con artists with some computer expertise, who wish to swindle more cautiously, now work from home. They set up websites that sell a wide variety of products that claim to detect, prevent, or even cure coronavirus. These take the form of test kits, vaccines, and medicines that are marketed as magic bullets, which are so effective that the medical world does not want people to know about them. Swindlers trade on desperation because many prospective victims are willing to go to great lengths and to considerable expense to purchase a small dose of hope.
The drugs marketed as coronavirus cures are also a scam and even less effective than the famous patent medicines of past centuries such as Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound or Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil. Still, in case anyone wishes to experiment, the following is a real snake (viper) oil recipe printed in Spain in 1719:
“Take 2 pounds of live snakes and 2 pounds 3 ounces of sesame oil. Cook slowly, covered in a glazed pot, until meat pulls away from bone. Strain and store. Uses: Cleans the skin, removes pimples, impetigo and other defects."
It would only be necessary to add “cures coronavirus” to the list of potential uses, and no snake in the world would be safe. Objectively speaking, consuming the snake oil in the above recipe is probably much safer than ingesting volcanic ash, bleach-like solutions, or colloidal silver, which are among the online cures for coronavirus currently available on Internet.
So, in times of coronavirus, people must implement new strategies. Darwinian survival depends on being able to adapt to meet new challenges, and work in new and unfamiliar environments. This means that people (both honest and dishonest) have to be able to be able to mutate. We must follow the example of the coronavirus and pray that we will be even half as successful.
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