Americans getting ready for a trip to Rome or Barcelona almost always buy one piece of gear with safety in mind. It buckles around the waist, rides up front where you can keep an eye on it, and feels a lot smarter than shoving your wallet in a back pocket. Pickpockets agree that it is easy to keep an eye on. That is the problem. The fanny pack is the loudest thing you can strap to your body in a crowded European train station, and the people who work those crowds for a living read it the same way you read a neon sign.
The Waist Pack Advertises Exactly Where Your Money Is
A thief does not have to guess what is in it or where you keep it. One longtime travel blogger lists three ways they get taken: the belt gets unhooked and snatched, the strap gets cut with a knife, or somebody simply walks up, looks tough, and demands the bag. None of that requires the light fingers you see in movies.
The item has also been rebranded more times than almost any product in the luggage aisle. Belt pack, belly bag, Buffalo pouch, hip sack, waist bag, hip pack, bum bag, moon bag, and the hopeful “belted satchel” have all been tried. The names changed and the reputation did not.
Most of theft prevention abroad is not about locks or gadgets. It is about not being the most interesting person on the sidewalk. You do not have to be uncrackable. You have to be harder work than the person standing next to you, and a pouch dangling off your belt makes you the easier option before anyone has looked at your face.
The Guy Who Sells Anti-Theft Pants Got Hit Wearing One
Stefan Loble, who went on to found the travel clothing company Bluffworks, lost a camera on day one of a three-week trip to Morocco with his best friend. He stepped off a train, walked into a crush of people to buy a bus ticket, and was carrying a large backpack on his back with a fanny pack in front holding his valuables.
He came out of the crowd with his ticket. The camera was gone. Looking back, he realized a few men in that scrum had not seemed especially eager to reach the ticket window, which is the tell nobody notices until later.
What makes travelers worth robbing has less to do with wealth than people assume. Loble lists four things stacked against you: you are a foreigner, so you are slow to read that something is off; you are carrying valuables because the trip requires it; you are unprepared, and raising your voice in a strange language takes nerve; and you are low risk, because a visitor leaving in four days is unlikely to file a report or chase anyone through a foreign court.
Your Backpack Is A Private Room With Your Back Turned
The second you put a backpack on your back in a packed metro car, you have handed a stranger a workspace you cannot see. Zippers open quietly. A light bump in a crowd covers the rest. Add a camera around your neck and a map held open in the street, and you look distracted and lost before you have said a word.
Wearing it on your back also marks you as a visitor before anything else about you does, because locals moving through their own neighborhoods usually carry almost nothing. If you need the pack, swing it around to your chest in a crowd, on escalators, and on any train platform. Better yet, use a structured crossbody with a zipper, worn across the front.
The Home Team Jersey Is Worse Than The Guidebook
A jersey, sweatshirt or cap from your home franchise is one of the clearest tourist markers there is, because Europeans basically do not wear that stuff around a city on a Tuesday. The same goes for an oversized shirt with a big American university logo on the chest. In places with their own rivalries or politics, the wrong shirt can pull in attention you were not shopping for, including confrontation.
Matching group shirts are the version of this nobody thinks twice about. Bachelor parties, school trips and family reunions love them. A printed uniform also makes a group easy to follow through a crowd, and makes whoever drifts off the back to take a photo easy to spot. If your crew wants to coordinate, pick a color, not a printed shirt.
The Outdoor Brands You Live In Are A Dead Giveaway
Louise Lague, editor of the “Expat Almanac,” a guide for international travelers, gave travel columnist Christopher Elliott a short list of what gives Americans away overseas in 2016. “No fake nails. No golf visors. No khakis,” she advised. “No fleece. Labels like Columbia and North Face are a dead giveaway.”
Designer logos cut the other way and land you in the same trouble. A big luxury label tells an opportunist you probably have a nice phone, nice cards and some cash to go with the handbag. Flashy jewelry does the same job faster, since a chain or a large watch can be grabbed in a second and sized up from across a plaza.
Flip-flops deserve their own mention for a reason that has nothing to do with fashion. They are hard to move in. If a crowd surges or you need to walk away from something quickly, thin sandals slow you down. Closed-toe sneakers in a plain color cost you nothing and keep your options open.
Violent Inmates Watched Strangers Walk And Picked The Easy Targets
In 1981, researchers showed 53 prison inmates convicted of violent crimes against strangers footage of pedestrians on a New York City street and asked how easy each one would be to attack. Some people were rated easy targets again and again. Age and sex played a part, but the strongest signal was something else.
It was how people moved. “Perpetrators notice a person whose walk lacks organized movement and flowing motion,” Psychology Today wrote in a 2009 account of the research. “Criminals view such people as less self-confident … and are much more likely to exploit them.”
That is why the best free protection on any trip is knowing roughly where you are going before you leave the hotel. If you get turned around, stop, step into a doorway or a shop, check your phone there, and walk out again like you have somewhere to be. Standing frozen in the middle of a plaza with your phone held out is the walking version of a fanny pack.
The Numbers Are Uglier Than The Travel Brochures Suggest
Pickpocketing in Europe is not evenly spread, and the busiest cities are brutal. Barcelona City Council data shows pickpocketing made up nearly half of all recorded crime in the city in 2023, and police recorded more than 94,000 such thefts across the city in 2024. Dutch police normally receive 15 to 20 pickpocketing reports a day nationwide, a national police official said in 2022. In the Rome area, reported pickpocketing passed 33,000 incidents in 2024, roughly two-thirds higher than in 2019, according to the research institute Censis.
Paris has its own ugly statistic. The U.S. Embassy in France says about 2,000 Americans a year report their passports lost or stolen in that city alone.
Zoom out and the odds for any one traveler stay low. Price-comparison site Quotezone.co.uk found that reviews of Italy’s top attractions mentioned pickpocketing 478 times for every million British visitors, and France’s 251 times. Low odds are cold comfort when the thing taken is your passport on day two of a seven-day trip.
What To Carry Instead Of The Pouch
Closures matter more than the bag itself. Clasps, clips and flaps come open in a half second in a crowd. Travel skills trainer Kevin Coffey singles out the open tote as the bag pickpockets love most, because it is so easy to get a hand into, and advises a zippered bag, ideally one with a locking mechanism.
Anti-theft bags from companies like Pacsafe take that further with slash-resistant material, lockable zippers and clips that attach the bag to a chair leg, which matters at a sidewalk cafe where bags vanish off the back of seats. Clothing with hidden and zippered pockets, like the Bluffworks Ascender Chino with its ten pockets, does the same job without announcing itself.
Two habits finish the job. Keep your phone and wallet out of your back pocket and out of sight, since a bulge back there is the one spot on your body where you genuinely will not feel a hand. And split your money instead of keeping cards and cash together, so a single bad minute does not clean you out for the rest of the trip.
Leave the waist pouch home. Put the team jersey at the bottom of the suitcase and wear it at the airport bar when you land back in the States. Plain shirts in plain colors, a zipped crossbody worn in front, shoes you can move in, and a walk that looks like you have done this before will do more for you than any gadget sold in the travel aisle.
