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Comment by james1071 | Hacker News Reader

There is a good chance that the person who took the laptop was acting with an accomplice, and that the woman making the scene was involved.

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So you actually think there are gangs that take flights just to steal stuff during baggage check?

It's quite possible and likely that the two women were just opportunistic thieves, or at least the one who took the laptop was. Opportunitistic theft is not at all uncommon among our species.

If they can pull off an improvised act like that on such short notice, they are professional con artists.

So why are they stealing laptops in an airport? They wouldn't: high risk, low reward.

The way I see it, it was simply an error on the part of the TSA, as discussed countless times in other comments.

Yeah, I can't rule out some more elaborate con but at least from the story as it's told here, it sounds like all of these folks were in a hurry, the author wasn't paying attention and didn't make sure he had his laptop before moving on, TSA handed it to the wrong person, and that person thought "ooh, score!"

Or maybe she didn't realize for a while and by that point, a combination of laziness and desire to keep this shiny, luxury model computer that had accidentally ended up in her possession led her to just hold onto it.

I think the number of people who will decide to keep something they find (dropped wallet, misplaced laptop, etc) is much higher than the number who would actively go out of their way to steal something. The end result is the same but I think psychologically, it takes effort to go out and steal whereas it takes effort to track down an owner while keeping a found item just requires apathy and/or greed.

It's pretty diabolical that they managed to make the guy leave his belt on, to make their entire conspiracy work.

Why wouldn't there be? Flights can be cheap, and security requires you to show up hours in advance, but there's no limit to the number of times you can cycle through security lines looking for targets.

Hmmmmm?

Every time I've ever flown, my boarding pass is marked up by a TSA agent before I go through the metal detector/body scanner/X-ray belt area. I think it'd be incredibly suspicious if you left and then back through, multiple times even more so.

I've been through security multiple times before (my daughter left her book in one of the groundside restaurants) and nobody cared. Anecdotal I know, but n=1 is better than n=0

Print multiple copies. The boarding pass checker has no way to authenticate them so you could even make fake boarding passes. Going through different checkpoints would not be noticed. Even going through the same checkpoint probably wouldn't be noticed.

I did this flying internationally. origin to OHare, OHare to philly, philly to London. Had hours to burn in Philly. Took a wander outside for a smoke, couldn't figure out how to get back inside (the layout seemed like it'd make plenty sense in a car, less so on foot, and a trainline blocked the obvious approach). So asked a nice policeman, who directed me.

Once we figured out that it wasn't actually difficult, we repeated once more before we left. Horrible habit I know, but on long flights/connections you spend near on a whole day "airside". It's pretty simple to just explain why you wanted to nip outside for some fresh* air.

If you're a smoker, then not so much. In order to smoke at Heathrow, for instance, I have to go landside (sometimes through passport control) and back, with no problem, sometimes more than once if a flight is delayed for a long time.

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