For Your Safety: Don’t flash cash; assume you’re being watched

Hubby and wife check into a beautiful 5-star hotel domestically or in a foreign land. It is their 25th wedding anniversary! They are treated like royalty by the front desk staff and are given tickets for a free executive massage!

They hurry to their room and get into their robes, excited about the free massage. The massage is wonderful but when they re-enter their room all of their cash, cards and jewelry are gone. Their vacation has become a nightmare and they go home in tears.

American vulnerabilities are well known to unscrupulous criminals. We have a tendency to take pride in our accomplishments and are quick to tell everyone about them. We freely talk about our businesses/lifestyles and proudly hand out business cards showing our address and email to other travelers and hotel staff members. We exude prosperity and carry lots of money. Are we setting ourselves up for a fall?

Here are tips to help keep your business or pleasure trip a happy experience:

• Don’t wear shirts with “USA” embroidered on them.

• Leave the expensive jewelry at home, and don’t flash wallets brimming with money and cards.

• Be respectful of other people and their cultures.

• Guard your laptop; more than 1,000 laptops are either stolen, lost, or copied every week at London’s Heathrow Airport. Most people have sensitive data on their laptop, especially company reps traveling on business.

Approximately 500,000 attempts to infect laptops with malware were made every hour at a recent international sporting event. A thief obtaining a laptop can be like you winning a lottery!

• Be aware, you may be targeted when you use free Wi-Fi at a fast food restaurant or the library, or use your Smartphone in a car! The internet is a snake pit these days.

For your travel safety

Rule No. 1 is always assume you are being surveilled as a potential target for robbery or business espionage. Be smart and careful.

Rule No. 2 is an adjunct to rule number one. Think like a Counter Intelligence agent. Try to proactively detect and assess potential threats and plan on how to deter them.

You don’t need to be James Bond but any safety plan is better than none.

As always, Situational Awareness is an all important factor in making your trip a happy and safe one. Guard against “normalcy bias” as bad things can happen to good people.

Preparedness, not paranoia!

K.H. Kraft has over 40 years of affiliations with Intelligence and Police organizations. Sources for these articles are decades of personal experience and numerous official manuals.