Sheesh. It’s bad enough people think hypnosis is supernatural without the police falling into slippery sloppy thinking. The Gulf Daily News falls for it and plays the sensationalist angle in reporting on new cases of trance thefts . . .

TWO more victims of a group of trance thieves have reported their cases to police after realising they were duped when they read about the crimes in the newspapers. Five Euroasians suspected in connection with a string of robberies using hypnotism were arrested by police on Monday. Three Turkish suspects were also detained for questioning on Tuesday in connection with the case. All victims, who had access to cash registries, were allegedly approached by the suspects and asked to see the biggest banknote in Bahrain. They later discover that several hundred dinars had vanished from the till once the suspects left their stores. The owner of a mobile shop in Gosi Mall, Hoora, said the trance thieves had stolen BD209 from his employee. The Bahraini owner, who did not wish to be named, said he did not report the theft to the police because the story sounded absurd. He said when the employee told him the story, he did not believe him, suspecting that he had miscounted or lost the amount. “The employee told me to deduct the amount from his salary even though he didn’t take the money and I told him to make it up by bringing in more profit,” he said. “The theft happened eight days before the thieves were caught, but when the newspapers wrote about the arrest I realised that what the employee had told me was true. “I went to the Hoora Police Station with the employee to report the theft. “The policeman asked me why I did not come forward earlier and I told him that I never thought they (the suspects) could put people in a trance and steal a large amount of money. “The employee identified the woman in a line up and the police took his statement.” In another similar incident, a Bahraini Hoora fuel station attendant reported the theft of BD200 after reading about the suspects in the newspaper. Two men who, he believed to be European, came up to him and asked for the largest currency in Bahrain. The attendant, who did not wish to be named, showed them the largest currency note and then they asked him how much 100 euros would be equivalent in Bahraini dinars. “I calculated the currency into Bahraini and told them. They then left,” he said. “The money went missing after the European men came and asked me these questions. “I reported the theft to the police when I read about their arrest in the newspaper. “I never knew that they stole the money, but after reading their description in the paper and how they ask people for the largest currency in Bahrain I connected the dots and realised that they are the same people who stole the BD200 from me.” “I am glad that these people are put away and I hope they get a tough sentence for what they did.”

While these guys may or may not be hypnotists, what they’re doing here is a classic con move which plays on automatic compliance through a number of other factors that have nothing to do with classic hypnosis. That they appear to be “foreigners” makes it easier for them to play out the fish-out-of-water angle and to get automatic compliance to certain requests. Asking to see the largest bill is one of focusing attention and misdirection (magician’s trick) so they can use sleight of hand to pick the cash register or do a substitution move to replace real bills or amounts when checking the amount on the exchange. The probably approach a number of follks before getting a positive compliance set with someone who automatically responds to the request, they are playing on suggestibility but situational gullibility is more important in this case.

This is no more “hypnosis” than any other classic conman’s trick.

It is also possible that some of the victims who come forward will be hoping to cash in on the hysteria to pocket their own profits as well. When there was a wave of “hypnorobberis” hitting India last year it was clear that a number of the victims were not trance victims per se but were using the trance rationale to help themselves explain how they could so easily be tricked by conmen. The Romanian hypnobankrobbery victim last year turned out to be working with the robbers (the teller was the girlfriend of the guy who walked away with the money). A number of cases in India also turned out to be cases of conmen using drugs that victims inhaled when sprayed in their faces that caused them to blackout for a few moments, improperly reported as hypnotic trance . . . girls who wake up after being taken advantage of by men using roofies sometimes report similar disorientations but here the drugs are used to aid robberies instead of rapes . . . neither have anything to do with hypnosis but sometimes do get reported that way (the Moscow Hypnorapist stories and others come to mind).

Hypnosis is powerful and automatic compliance and trance states can be created conversationally by a skilled operator (heck, neurolinguistic programming has tons of conversational patterns that can be used to enhance influence) but most of the hypnorobberies and the like that hit newspapers have nothing to do with hypnosis and everything to do with common trickery and con gambits. It’s just that hypnorobbery sells more papers than a mere con man’s trick.