It would appear to be the perfect way to rob a bank or store of some kind… No guns needed, no excessive force, no traumatising experience for the attendant… The man just walked into the store (on camera), armed only with his hypnotic skills, he hypnotised the member of staff behind the counter, emptied the till and waltzed off with a thick wad of cash… Easy peasey!
Is that what really happened, do you think?
I am not convinced… Manmy people have told me about this story, here is what this hypnosis article at the BBC said:
Police in Italy have issued footage of a man who is suspected of hypnotising supermarket checkout staff to hand over money from their cash registers.
In every case, the last thing staff reportedly remember is the thief leaning over and saying: “Look into my eyes”, before finding the till empty.
In the latest incident captured on CCTV, he targeted a bank at Ancona in northern Italy, then calmly walked out.
A female bank clerk reportedly handed over nearly 800 euros (£630).
The cashier who was shown the video footage has no memory of the incident, according to Italian media, and only realised what had happened when she saw the money missing.
CCTV from the bank showed her apparently being hypnotised by the man, according to the reports.
Now then… We need to know more about this, don’t we?
If it was and is that easy, then why are we not reading about this happening all over the world in a far more proliferate manner? Why are bank staff not being trained against this type of occurrence?
Can you remember when I wrote about something similar being reported in a shop last year? Apparently, it was an inside job and the cashiers pretended that they were hypnotised and had shared the spoils with the hypnosis-wielding robber… They must have thought they were on to a winner when they told the police they could not remember anything because they were hypnotised!
In reality, and unless the individual is being exceptionally compliant… and even with a shared intention of doing so, complete amnesia of an event is unlikely… We do have reports of victims of extreme trauma having amnesia of the event as a safety mechanism, but there is no evidence of such trauma here.
The hypnotist may have been so brilliantly skilled that he was able to misdirect the attention of the cashier at a superfast rate without having developed any rapport… Yet even a vaguely astute and conscientious cashier is likely to be able to resist the kinds of stage hypnosis tricks when such behaviour is very alien in these circumstances.
Maybe that was it, maybe it was a shock, maybe it was so strange, out of place and confusing that the trance delivered surprised the cashier to such an extent that they simply were tranced beyond all recognition and were unable to emerge with any knowledge of anything happening…
Oh come on…
It is a misnomer that anyone who is hypnotised cannot remember anything of the process. So I find it very hard to believe (though not completely out of the question) that the cashier had no memory of it at all.
What’s more, how likely is this to have happened? For the cashier to be hypnotised by a complete stranger in the middle of their working environment?
I am going to wait and read more about this story to give a full verdict, but I am really very sceptical right now.
Hope you had a fabulous Easter weekend… I certainly did and managed to avoid chocolate egg poisoning!
Yes, I’m pretty skeptical about this one as well. It would be an exceptional hypnotist and an exceptional subject who could pull this one off. He would have to build extremely rapid rapport, she would need to be capable of very quickly going into an extremely deep state and achieving both a significant level of hallucination and post-hypnotic amnesia, and he would have to be able to assess that this was the case based on, presumably, a very brief interaction.
If he’s that good, he could be making a lot more than 800 euros without having to steal.
Mike, you are absolutely spot on – he could be making a great deal more with those kinds of skills. Thank you!
In addition, here is what on Robertson noted about this story at facebook:
I’ve seen similar confidence tricks before. I think he’s probably just saying weird things about hypnosis to confuse the teller then pointing at something to misdirect their attention while he grabs the cash. People do similar things without any mention or use of hypnosis at all, it’s just confusion and misdirection of attention. If you look at the CCTV footage closely it looks like he’s leading her to look away from the cash while he takes it.
An Indian fakir came into my shop with a battered suitcase. He opened it and took out a flower, some other junk, and an old photograph of some Indian men. He rambled incoherently in a thick accent about psychic powers and shoved the picture under my nose. Then he demanded, “How many figure in this picture now?”, or something, prodding at the photograph. I was a bit confused and couldn’t figure out at first what he was asking or why. While I was wondering what to say, he was doing a sleight of hand out of view. Similar thing.