Pay attention to your wallet: these are pickpockets’ favorite tourist destinations

As we approach the holidays, it’s important to remember that not everyone will be well-intentioned.

A study by UK-based travel insurance company QuoteZone highlighted that many popular European destinations are hotspots for pickpockets. The researchers analyzed the proportion of mentions of pickpocketing in visitor reviews of the top five tourist attractions in each European country.

Italy comes first, with the highest proportion, followed by France and Spain.

QuoteZone found that there are 478 mentions of pickpocketing for every million British visitors to Italy’s top tourist attractions.

The capital’s iconic Trevi Fountain came first in the country-specific ranking. The 18th century architectural masterpiece receives an average of a thousand visitors per hour.

Tourists throw around 1,000,000 euros into its waters every year – but it is important that visitors are aware of the crowd while throwing the coins.

Also in Rome, it was discovered that the ancient Colosseum and the Pantheon were specific locations for pickpockets. Outside the Eternal City, the Duomo di Milano in Milan and the Gallerie Degli Uffizi in Florence were also reported to have the highest volume of personal items stolen in online travel reviews in Italy.

France is an extremely popular destination for tourists from around the world, with Paris consistently being one of the most visited cities in the world.

The research found that the city has the second highest number of mentions of pickpocketing across Europe, with 251 per million visitors.

All five top monitored attractions are in Paris – and the world-famous Eiffel Tower was, perhaps unsurprisingly, considered the most risky for theft.

Despite attracting very different types of tourists, both Spain and Germany each recorded 111 cases of theft per million visitors.