Foto: Oliver Miranda
Catalan daily publication Ara had a story yesterday (May 13, 2012) about a trio of Romanians posing as police and robbing tourists in Barcelona.
They were dressed in blue jackets, caps and had walkie-talkies, which they used to speak with a pretend control room.
Of the three, only two dressed as police. The third pretended to be a tourist and made the initial approach to the target, asking some direction on a map, or similar. It was then that the two fake police approached and asked for identification. The ploy allowed them to take money and property of value from the unsuspecting tourist.
Plain clothes agents from the local Mossos d’Esquadra police force had been tracking the individuals and were able to catch them in the act near Sants train station.
When they swooped they found that the thieves had extracted €855 from the tourist. The money was returned to the victim and the trio were arrested.
The detainees were named as Florian C., 32 year old Romanian nationality, E. Ion, 32-year-old Romanian nationality and resident of Barcelona and C. Cristian, 39 year old Romanian nationality and resident of Barcelona. The first two had 11 prior arrests between them. They were charged in this instance with pretending to be police and for theft.
The three were brought to trial, were fined and then immediately released.
And that ladies and gentlemen is why we have hundreds of thieves on the streets of Barcelona daily.
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Amazing. In most countries, impersonating police officers is considered a serious, and rightly so too as very few people will question the motives of a police officer.
Now that I know it’s not a particularly serious crime, I can think of many get rich quick schemes revolving around impersonating police officers. Open season!
In Barcelona, the shame of dressing as a pathetic police officer is considered punishment enough for dressing as a pathetic police officer.
[...] See here: http://www.robbedinbarcelona.com/2012/05/14/fake-police-rob-tourist-of-e855-theyre-arrested-what-hap… [...]
I was robbed by the samilar trio of persons today 30 minutes back today 3rd june
we were at a mall near a food court searching for what to eat ( my associate is a vegetarian)
a middle aged person walks up to us and asks polietly if we were looking for some food so i said ya we want vegetarian food , he said just at the corner of this block is a vegetarian resturant and pretending to show us the same just took us to the corner suddenly 2 men flashed IDcards and stopped us they asked us if the spanish guy was troubling us and we said no he was just showing us a resturant they then said that have we bought drugs from the spanish guy as they were plain clothed policemen and they have to search us for drugs
they made us open our wallets and removed 500 euros from my wallet by destracting my attention on the pretex of searching me for drugs , they said there were many peddlers in tourist areas and that we should be careful . they asked us to be careful and we were frightened due to the whole epsode we walked very fast to our hotel and then i just opened my wallet to check it and realized that they had removed half my money barcelona sucks sad it was my first day here and will definately warn all friends about this horrable place
b
We were also a victim of the same scam a couple of hours ago….. Scary place!
A few nights ago (August 2012), I was in Barcelona walking back with my family after dinner (around 11pm), when a guy approached me. He asked me something in spanish, to which I said “No entiendo”. He then said, “Ah, are you a tourist?”. He said he was looking for someone to take a picture of him in front of a Pans & Co (like a local Starbucks). Strangely, it was across the street from where we were, which set off a warning flag, but his story was something like “his friend had a taken a photo like that and he wanted a similar photo”
He lead me across the street (separating me a little bit from my family). At this point I was thinking this guy was odd (because the Pans & Co was still open and still had people inside – why had he not asked someone there) for separating me a bit from the family, so I looked around a bit before taking the photo and saw two guys at the far end of the street, but no one close enough to hit me over the head or mug me. Right after I took the photo and handed the camera back to the guy, two other guys (that I had seen walking) showed up and very quickly flashed an ID, saying “police”.
At that point, some instinct fired and I said in a very loud voice “This is BS!” and started walking away. The “cop” retorted that “No, it is BS for this guy” (indicating the tourist who had asked me to take a photo, trying to indicate that guy was in trouble). I just kept walking, and they didn’t stop me. I assume if they had been legitimate police, they would have.
This was pretty confusing to me until I found this blog, and I think what happened was this: All the guys were in on it. If I hadn’t walked away, I think they would have found something bad on the fake tourist, and used that as an excuse to check my ID (and thus take my money, although I wasn’t really carrying very much cash on me anyways).
I got lucky, though, so nothing happened. A couple thoughts on how I might have avoided this in the first place:
1) Don’t get separated from your group (especially late at night, but my guard was down after dinner)
2) Don’t trust random people who flash ids very quickly
Hopefully this helps people in future trips to Barcelona.
I hate Barcelona and will never go back in this place, the place is beautiful but very unsafety. Me and my husband had been a victim of 3 men pretended an undercover police….. Took €500.00 Beware!