L.A. Leads Nation in Travel Agency Armed Robberies

Los Angeles has become the focus of a $300-million nationwide black market in stolen airline tickets and a rash of escalating violence against travel agents.

Already the bank robbery capital of the nation, Los Angeles County has also become No. 1 in travel agency heists, authorities said.

An armed robbery at a Granada Hills travel agency last week ended in the fatal shooting of two suspected ticket thieves by a Los Angeles police unit that had been investigating a series of 25 travel agency robberies since January.

The thieves are well organized, stealing thousands of blank tickets at a time, forging them and typically reselling them for $200 to $10,000 apiece, authorities said.

Demand for the stolen tickets is high among illegal immigrants who use Los Angeles International Airport as a gateway to the nation’s interior. For the last two years, LAX was the No. 1 destination and departure point for travelers using stolen tickets, statistics show.

Hot tickets, which sell for a fraction of real fares, are sometimes part of a package deal provided by coyotes, the people who lead illegal immigrants over the border.

A report last month by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that losses from stolen airline tickets in 1997 and 1998 totaled $300 million.

Although stolen airline tickets account for a tiny portion of tickets issued each year and losses are infinitesimal compared with overall revenue, the trend has left travel agents in fear for their lives as armed robberies surged last year, according to airline industry sources.

While losses from all kinds of airline ticket thefts dropped 40% nationwide from 1997 to 1998, such losses from armed robberies of travel agents rose 300%, according to an airline industry group that tracks a portion of stolen tickets.

Detection of forged tickets seems relatively simple. The GAO report suggested several ways to prevent ticket theft, including the use of optical scanners.

Airline industry officials say such technology is too costly to deploy at all terminals. But travel agents believe they are paying dearly for the airlines’ frugality.

“The airlines, in my humble opinion, could stop this,” said a Westlake Village travel agent who was recently held at gunpoint and tied up while thieves ransacked his business. Officials with the American Society of Travel Agents, which represents more than 11,000 agencies nationally, agree.

“If you ask an agent who understands the problem, they would say that airlines have not done enough to eliminate the market value,” said Paul Ruden, the association’s senior vice president for legal and industry affairs. “We’ve testified before Congress to that effect; we’ve written the Department of Transportation. Nothing changes. We still have robberies.”

Jim Manning, director of security for Airlines Reporting Corp.--an organization representing 140 airlines and three railroads--said the industry is doing the best it can.

Most airline tickets are printed on “ticket stock,” each with a specific serial number. Industry experts liken ticket stock to the paper sheets used for printing United States currency. Travel agents print the itinerary on the blank ticket stock.

But many airlines do not keep track of serial numbers, and those that do seldom have the means to detect stolen tickets efficiently, according to the GAO report.

To date, British Airways is the only major airline using its database and optical scanners at most gates to detect fraud, according to Airlines Reporting Corp. U.S. officials said marketing--not security--was the main motivation behind the scanners.

“They used the scanners to keep track of frequent-flier miles, customer profiles, revenue stream,” said GAO researcher Kathleen Turner. “They bought them for other reasons and then found out that they had this other benefit--but now they’re detecting enough stolen ticket stock that it pays for itself.”

Better detection of stolen airline tickets would eventually cut off demand and help prevent travel agency robberies, experts said.

Hot airline tickets reach the street through loosely organized rings of robbers, forgers and fencers, law enforcement officials said. Until last year, many stolen tickets were taken in burglaries, but in 1998 the number of armed holdups quadrupled, even as overall thefts declined.

The robbers then sell the tickets to counterfeiters, who use personal computers and printers to forge itineraries. The counterfeiters then sell the tickets to fencers, who use classified advertisements and word of mouth to find customers.

Many of the customers, investigators say, are foreign nationals who wish to visit family abroad or illegal immigrants who have crossed the border and are trying to avoid immigration officials. The GAO report said Immigration and Naturalization Service investigators rarely scrutinize domestic travelers and concentrate their resources at U.S. points of entry.

Of 8,330 stolen tickets tracked by Airline Reporting Corp. in 1998, about 54% (4,476 tickets) were for flights originating from one of three U.S. locations--Los Angeles, San Diego or Phoenix. Similarly, about 28% (2,342 tickets) were for flights destined for one of five U.S. locations--Los Angeles, Charlotte, Chicago, Atlanta or the New York City area.

In February, the INS caught and deported 162 illegal immigrants--many of them with stolen tickets--on three domestic flights at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix.

In Los Angeles, the number of robberies continues to grow.

In the January robbery of the Westlake Village agency, three men were arrested after they led police on a freeway chase. They were convicted in a series of robberies at travel agencies and sentenced to state prison terms of one to 15 years.

Since late last year, robbers have targeted travel agencies in the San Fernando Valley. The two men killed in the Aug. 14 incident, and two others charged with robbery and conspiracy, are thought to be responsible for as many as 25 travel agency holdups this year, according to police.