Pickpocketing

Romanian pickpockets have infested Bulgaria recently. For the first time the police had spotted them at the start of the pandemic. Then they were just on a "guest tour." Late last year, however, they came for a longer time, even renting a flat in Sofia, Nova TV reported.

The Greek Police (ELAS) on Tuesday announced a successful crackdown on a gang of pickpockets who were active at the Larissis railway station in central Athens.

According to ELAS, three suspected gang members, all foreign nationals, were arrested at the station in operations conducted last Friday and Saturday.

Four suspected pickpockets have been remanded in custody this morning. In two separate arraignments, the four women from Bulgaria were charged with carrying out pickpocket thefts in Valletta.

Three Bulgarian citizens have been detained for stealing Macedonian capital Skopje
 
The three, aged 19, 27 and 41, are arrested at the entrance to one of the city's central markets.

Informal information is about pickpockets of Roma origin.

Two girls, aged 14 and 15, have been arrested for pickpocketing shoppers at a mall in the northern Athens suburb of Maroussi, police said on Wednesday.

The two youngsters, who are reportedly from Bulgaria, were nabbed last Friday after police identified them in closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage.

A police crackdown last week on a gang of pickpockets working in Greek capital has led to 31 arrests so far and the resolution of 764 reported thefts, along with the seizure of 9,500 euros in cash, the Greek Police said in an official announcement on Monday.

Twelve people, most of them Romanians, accused of running a child pickpocketing network that stole over a million euros during 2014-16 from tourists at Disneyland Paris, went on trial on Tuesday in the town of Meaux, French newspaper Le Figaro reported.

Police efforts to crack down on rampant crime in places like Menidi, northwest of Athens, are indeed praiseworthy.

However, there are still hundreds of reports made every day by Greeks and foreigners indicating that purse snatchers, pickpockets and all sorts of small-time crooks are the bane of many parts of downtown Athens and public transportation across the capital.