In Thailand, watch your passport

[jsr]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/03/10/in-thailand-watch-your-passport/

In Thailand, watch your passport
By Terrence McCoy
March 10, 2014 at 12:29 am

While nearly every aspect of this weekend’s disappearance of a Malaysian jetliner is surprising, one element is not. At least two of its 239 passengers had been traveling with stolen passports — and those documents had been lost in Thailand, home to what’s become one of the most robust stolen passport trades in the world.

Both Luigi Maraldi, a short-haired Italian, and a 30-year-old Austrian named Christian Kozel had been traveling through a southern province in Thailand called Phuket when their passports were lost — or stolen.

In 2012, Kozel’s went missing in Phuket, which juts out of Thailand’s main coast like a snaggletooth. And on July 22 of last year, someone took Maraldi’s after the Italian submitted his passport as collateral on a rented motorbike, by far the most used means of transportation in Southeast Asia.

The theft of his passport reflects broader trends. Many motorbike rental shops will only allow a tourist to take a bike if he or she deposits their passport as collateral. Most passports make their way back to their owner, but some do not. When Maraldi asked for his back at a bike shop hugging Phuket’s western coast, the owner told him she’d forked it over to an Italian who’d “said Mr. Maraldi was his husband.”

[djean111]

1. Had my passport stolen at the train station at Narita Airport.

Waiting for the train, just flown in non-stop from Atlanta, had to take a train because there was a bit of snow and the lovely Limousine Bus company had ceased to run buses. The looong bus ride into Tokyo is relaxing, to me.
Anyway, I was just waiting on the platform with my luggage, and out of nowhere appeared a noisy jostling group of people with some sort of European accents. I got bumped into a few times, and just when my tired old brain started to think hey, I have heard about this tactic - the people disappeared. Checked my purse - passport gone. I had forgotten to zip it after going through customs and immigration or whatever.

Quite a process to get a new one, luckily I was staying at the same hotel as last time and they had a copy.
I have always wondered how my passport was used. The guy at the American embassy said a used American passport was worth quite a bit (this was around 1996 or so), and it was a good thing for me that this was the first time I had reported mine stolen.
The Japanese always made me explain the whole thing again on subsequent trips, because there was a letter (in Japanese characters) stapled into my new passport stating that I had lost the original entrance stamp.

My advice - be paranoid about your passport, and carry copies of it in pockets, wallets, luggage.

[seveneyes]

2. Handing over a passport to rent a motorbike?

One would have to be mindless. Aside from the sheer foolishness of such an act, taking a chance of getting stuck in such a foreign place without a passport is suicidal.