Has that man in the aisle seat nicked your phone?

Also last year, CCTV images helped pick out a woman suspect after a duty-free shop at Delhi airport reported a pair of sunglasses missing. The woman was intercepted wearing the shades at the boarding gate, and was made to pay for them. She also said sorry in writing.

In Delhi again, 10 days before the incident in Bangalore, a foreign couple were caught nicking a mobile phone left on a seat at Vaango restaurant in Terminal 3 by a passenger who was travelling to Bhopal.

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A new tribe of thieves is stalking India’s airports. They aren’t the usual suspects — loaders who have been known to target checked-in luggage — nor do they fit the conventional descriptions of cheats, pickpockets or other crooks with similar talents.

In many cases, they are the elite of society — well-dressed, well-heeled men and women with an eye on expensive belongings of fellow passengers or high-value goods at airport shops.

“The regular criminal is no longer an unkempt person who has a questionable appearance. Fellow travellers are indulging in thefts at airports. Passengers need to be alert about others around them, so that such incidents can be prevented,” Arvind Rajan, director-general of the CISF, told The Indian Express.

The CISF has just completed an analysis of voluminous footage from CCTV cameras installed at airport terminals across India, covering the period from 2012 onward. The big-picture conclusions: the incidence of theft at airports has been increasing, and the incidence of the involvement of richer, more educated sections of people in them has been increasing as well.

As many as 52,978 expensive items, valued at Rs 32.06 crore, were recovered by the CISF after they had been reported stolen or lost at airports across the country in 2014. That is, 145 lost or stolen items worth close to Rs 9 lakh were recovered on average every day.

Recoveries increased 23 per cent in 2014 over the previous year, and their value jumped almost 60 per cent from Rs 20.04 crore, suggesting that increasingly more expensive items were being lost or stolen at airports.

Of the 52,978 items recovered in 2014, 9729 items worth Rs 15.33 crore were restored to passengers directly by the CISF, while the rest were deposited with the airport operators.

Because many culprits were regular passengers, operating freelance rather than in organised gangs, it was tough to curb their activities, CISF officers said. Also, the CISF worked mostly on verbal complaints made by passengers who were, in most cases where the culprits were caught, reluctant to press charges against a fellow flier.

In several cases, the culprits readily accepted their deeds. In July 2014, CISF, with assistance from Sri Lankan Airlines and immigration officials, tracked down a man suspected to have filched a Sri Lankan woman’s bag that contained three gold bangles and two bottles of Scotch at Bangalore airport. The man confessed, and was made to come to Bangalore from Chennai to retrieve the bag that he had left with a friend, and hand it over to the police.

Some were serial offenders. In December last year, a woman passenger was interrogated for allegedly nicking the purse of a fellow passenger travelling from Bangalore to Hyderabad. During the questioning, it emerged that the suspect had also stolen two iPhones on the same journey.

One tactic of the thieves, the CISF analysis shows, was to replace their targets’ iPads, iPhones and laptops with cheaper gadgets of their own and, when caught, plead they had made an “unintentional mistake”.

Some thefts appeared to have been planned meticulously. The CISF report details a case in which a passenger would catch in Delhi or Mumbai an international flight headed to Kochi, where he would hurry to the baggage belt ahead of other passengers and, after picking up the bag of an international traveller, replace its tag with that of a domestic flier before walking past Customs and out of the terminal.

On the day he was caught, he had with him four bags belonging to multiple passengers flying Gulf Air, Emirates and Qatar Airways, the CISF report says.

In a few cases, gangs appear to have been involved. On March 13, 2013, the CISF apprehended three men in Mumbai in connection with the theft of Rs 1 lakh from a passenger travelling to Chandigarh from Mumbai. The trio would target other passengers in crowded areas, and one among the gang would pinch either a bag or its contents as the others distracted the victim or blocked the line of his vision. They would also steal bags in the arrivals hall.

The men were handed over to the local police, who during interrogation found the gang’s hand in seven other thefts at the airports in Goa, Bangalore, Jaipur, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Nagpur.