Criminal Ring Victimizes Travel Agencies and Stumps Investigators

They’ve lugged a 350-pound cement safe down a flight of stairs. Bashed through a wall with a sledgehammer. Pried open a safe bolted firmly to the floor.

All in pursuit of a small metal plate and a fistful of paper.

In the past 10 months, a criminal ring has ripped through Ventura County travel agencies, snatching hundreds of blank airline tickets and validation plates embossed with a secret code.

By running blank tickets over the metal plates on a credit-card machine, the thieves can churn out counterfeit tickets that look legitimate--and sell them at cut-rate prices that add up to big bucks.

A dozen Ventura County travel agencies have been burglarized since July, and at least as many have withstood attempted break-ins. During a two-week period last month, thieves hit four travel agencies in Thousand Oaks and Moorpark.

Each burglary follows the same pattern: Its perpetrators are skilled, focused and mystifying to police.

Ignoring fax machines, computers and printers, the burglars target safes containing blank tickets and validation plates. If they can’t jimmy them open or smash them, the crooks simply haul the safes outside and drive off with them.

For inside the safes lie, quite literally, their ticket to wealth.

First-class jaunts to South America, round-trip fares to Mexico, domestic flights across the United States--to date, several hundred thousand dollars worth of tickets have been forged using plates stolen from Ventura County, according to police and travel agents.

“It’s like they’re setting up some kind of sweatshop to send people all around the world,” said Dean Langdon, a spokesman for the American Society of Travel Agencies.

Police believe that the same gang of about a dozen South American criminals has been responsible for most of the Ventura County raids--and indeed, for similar travel agency break-ins across Southern California.

But beyond that, detectives admit they’re stumped.

“It’s very intricate, very complicated and very frustrating,” said Detective Nancy Stovall, who works out of the Sheriff’s Department’s East County station. “I feel very naive.”

It took Stovall several months just to realize that the ransacked travel agency she visited back in July was more than a run-of-the-mill, smash-and-grab robbery.

Her first hint came when the burglarized agency, Carlson Travel Network in Newbury Park, began receiving bills from airlines demanding reimbursement for tickets that it had never issued. About $120,000 worth of tickets, many for flights to Guadalajara, Mexico, had been booked using Carlson’s stolen validation code.

As the bills began surfacing, Stovall said she learned that similar burglaries had been reported in Ventura, Camarillo, Moorpark and throughout Los Angeles County.

Suddenly, she said she understood that her case represented a criminal ring’s first foray into Ventura County. But since then, Stovall’s investigation has stalled. Although police across Southern California have traded information, they are unable to crack the fake-ticket scam.

“These people (in the criminal ring) are the same ones who were preying on jewelry salesmen in Los Angeles a few years ago--they’ve branched out into other areas,” said Detective Tom Donnelly of the Los Angeles Police Department, who has tracked more than 75 burglaries in Southern California over the past year.

“You’re talking millions of dollars in stolen airline tickets,” Donnelly said. “It’s very difficult to be proactive against them because they’re all transient, they’re always on the move. Burglaries in L. A. have dropped way off since the new year, but now Ventura’s getting hit really hard.”

In a rare triumph for detectives working on the case, Upland police arrested five men as they started to slam through a travel agency’s wall in December. The suspects remain in custody awaiting trial, Detective Steve Adams said.

But the five men behind bars “aren’t the big players--they just do the dirty work,” Adams said.

And so, with the masterminds still at large, the burglaries continue.

Travel agency rip-offs first emerged as a major problem in 1992, when the national Airline Reporting Corp. recorded 130 break-ins--more than 60% of them in California. In the first three months of this year, the group registered 30 incidents nationwide, again with many in California.

Although they hit only a tiny fraction of the nation’s 41,000 travel agencies, criminals will circulate almost 100,000 forged, stolen tickets this year, according to Airline Reporting Corp. statistics.

“No one’s talking about it because it’s a dog-eat-dog business, but if we don’t band together, we’ll all go down,” said Lori Connors, manager of Creative Travel in Thousand Oaks.

Her agency was robbed in mid-March, and Connors said, “It’s really tough mentally, because you feel violated. What makes you even madder is that the police don’t have a clue.”

Sleuthing has proved especially difficult because the ring adeptly snows detectives with a convoluted paper trail.

When printing a fake ticket, the criminals use the blank stock from one travel agency and the validation code from another. Often, they sell batches of counterfeits to middlemen, who then anonymously peddle bargain-basement tickets at swap meets, on corporate bulletin boards or in classified ads.

Thus, even when a savvy airline employee nabs a passenger trying to board with a fake, police say they often have trouble tracking the stolen ticket to its source.

As for the travel agents, they can only watch helplessly as their validation numbers surface on fake tickets--and worse yet, on bills.

Since he was robbed in October, Bill Riggs has received $30,000 in bills from airlines who accepted first-class tickets to Hong Kong, South America and Texas stamped with his validation number.

Because he reported the theft of his blank tickets and validation plate, Riggs most likely will not have to pay for the tickets illegally charged to his firm, Carmen Plaza Travel of Camarillo, agents said.

The airlines may never get reimbursed.

“The airlines jointly are losing millions of dollars every year. LAX is the capital of revenue fraud worldwide,” said a security expert with a major carrier, who asked not to be identified.

Because the fake tickets look real--although they’re usually hand-written instead of computer-generated--employees at hectic terminals often accept them without question.

Each airline receives a list of stolen tickets, which carry serial numbers much like travelers’ checks. But often, airline employees neglect to double-check their lists at the gate, police said.

Furious that the thieves can find such a welcoming market for their stolen goods, many travel agents blame the airlines’ lax security for stimulating the rash of break-ins.

But spokesmen for several major carriers said they require employees to scrutinize tickets. In addition, some airlines reward gate attendants for spotting bogus tickets.

Occasionally, travel agents themselves can uncover a forgery.

Agents routinely receive information about schedule changes on flights that they have booked. If they are notified of a change but haven’t issued a ticket for the flight in question, they can bet that a criminal has.

And the passenger holding that ticket will be met at the gate by police.

Technically, police can charge the passengers they catch with possession of stolen property. In practice, though, they usually confiscate the fake and leave the traveler alone--scot-free, but stranded at the airport.

“Many times, the passenger doesn’t know a ticket was stolen--he just bought it on the street as a deal he couldn’t pass up,” said travel agency association spokesman Langdon.

While such deals may be irresistible, they should also trigger alarm bells, police warn. If a ticket price looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Or, to cite one travel agent’s rule of thumb, “You don’t buy a BMW for $3,000.”

Still, most people who buy stolen tickets get away with it.

Acting on tips in two cases on which he is working, Detective Anthony Anzilotti of the Simi Valley Police Department said he has stopped 15 passengers holding fake tickets at Los Angeles International Airport. Meanwhile, he said, countless more have safely traveled on forged tickets stolen last year from two agencies in his city.

“This type of crime is on an equal level with the drug trade in terms of its expansion,” Anzilotti said. “The tickets are spreading out and going everywhere.”

So are the criminals.

“I thought we were out here in never-never land and nothing would get to us, but now they’re out here and they’re punching holes in our wall,” said Terry Weaver of Newbury Park Travel, a small agency off the Ventura Freeway that was hit in mid-March.

Ruefully, travel agent Riggs agreed: “We feel a little smug sitting out here in the suburbs. But it’s become quite an epidemic up and down the 101.”