We Got Robbed on the Overnight Bus from Oaxaca to San Cristobal (and So Did Five Other People)

After a week in Oaxaca, eating our way around the mercados and wrestling with Spanish at language school, the overnight bus to San Cristóbal de las Casas felt like the easy part. Board in the evening, sleep through the mountains, wake up in Chiapas. One of those travel days you don’t think twice about.

We should have thought twice.

The bus, for the record, was great

Credit where it’s due. The ADO overnight is one of the nicer buses you’ll get anywhere in this part of the world. We were on the standard service, which ADO confusingly calls primera clase even though it’s the base tier, and it was still comfortable: proper reclining seats, a toilet on board, a film, and regular stops at service stations through the night.

The film played on one of those screens that folds down out of the ceiling. When it folded away again it didn’t quite latch, and it banged. All night. Through earplugs.

I would genuinely rather be robbed again than listen to that screen for another eleven hours, which, as it turned out, was roughly the choice on offer.

The empty wallet

We arrived in the morning and made the dreary walk from the bus stop to our hostel. First thing we did, like everyone does, was connect to the Wi-Fi.

Notifications started coming through from Wise. My partner’s account had been suspended.

She hastily pulled her wallet out of her daypack to check the card was still there. The wallet was exactly where she’d left it, in the bag that was exactly where she’d left it. She opened it up and it was completely empty. Every card gone. The cash gone. Same wallet, same pocket, nothing inside.

We were speechless, and then fairly panicked.

Then we got to work, logging into bank accounts, calling the banks back home and cancelling cards one by one.

What happened while we slept

Somewhere in the dark, somebody had reached under my partner’s seat, lifted the bag out and gone through it. They took every card and about NZ$600 in cash. Then they put the wallet back in the bag, and the bag back under the seat, and left it precisely as they’d found it.

Her passport was still in there. So was her laptop.

It’s a tidy bit of thieving when you think about it. A passport or a laptop has to be sold on, and it can be traced. A handful of bank cards turns into money within the hour, and as long as the bag is sitting right where you left it, nobody goes looking until long after the bus has emptied.

The bus was fairly full, and with the service stops people came and went all night. Behind us sat an older lady who did not look like the robbing type, though I never got a proper look at whoever was in the seat beside her. The pair of them got off at around half past midnight, and going by when the money started moving, I would put a fair bit on that being them.

Which means that for the rest of the night, while we slept on towards Chiapas, the cards were already being emptied somewhere behind us.

The charges tell you how: one hit of 5,000 pesos, then a long run of 1,000-peso transactions, one after another, until there was nothing left. As it happens, 1,000 pesos is the most you can tap a card for in Mexico without being asked for a PIN. My best guess is a portable card machine and a very busy night.

Five more at the hostel

The next day, five more people turned up at Puerta Vieja with exactly the same story. Bag under the seat, cash and cards gone, passport left behind, wallet politely returned.

That is when it stopped feeling like bad luck and started feeling like a business model. Six of us at least, off one bus, on one night.

Four police stations

Our travel insurance was going to want a police report, so we set off to get one, and spent the morning touring San Cristóbal’s police stations. Four of them, in the end.

The police themselves were actually lovely. They were also carrying massive firearms, which takes some adjusting to when you’ve grown up somewhere the police generally don’t carry anything at all.

The problem wasn’t the people, it was the system. Each station, in our very bad Spanish, ended with us being pointed towards a different one. The grand finale was being told that what we actually needed was the auditor general for the ADO bus line, based at yet another station out of town.

That is where we called it. It had all got too hard.

The PDF that saved it

The fix came from a laptop instead.

Mexico’s federal prosecutor’s office, the FGR, runs an online complaint form. We filled it in, somebody got back to us, and at the end of it we were able to download our own police report as a PDF. World Nomads accepted it, and that was the claim sorted.

If you ever need one, skip the police-station tour and start with the FGR’s online complaint form. That is simply what worked for us, not legal advice.

Wise, Amex, and the long wait

Wise was superb. It spotted the fraud, suspended the account and told us about it, which is the only reason we found out at all, and the money was back almost immediately. Amex was good too.

Our New Zealand banks made us wait until the fraudulent payments had fully gone through before we could even open a claim, which is a bit like being told you can report the burglary once the burglars have finished. That took about three weeks. We did get back all of the roughly NZ$3,000 they had taken, in the end.

My cards had never been in her bag, which is how I came to spend the rest of the trip as the designated sugar daddy.

What I’d do differently

None of this is about padlocks. Nobody broke anything. What matters is making a stolen card useless, and finding out the moment somebody tries to use one.

• Turn on instant notifications for every card before you leave. It’s the only reason we knew.
• Switch off contactless and magnetic stripe payments for overnight journeys. In the Wise app they’re separate toggles under card controls, and they take seconds to switch back on in the morning.
• Split your cards between bags and between people, and keep one on your body.
• Keep your daypack on your lap or between your feet, not under the seat.
• Check your accounts when you arrive, even when everything looks untouched. Especially then.

We took the bus again

For what it’s worth, the rest of Mexico felt completely safe. Walking tours, markets, evenings out in both Oaxaca and San Cristóbal, never a moment’s worry.

And we kept getting on buses. At the end of the trip we took ADO again down in Bacalar and Tulum without really thinking about it, and they were fine. It is still the most practical way to make the Oaxaca run, too: every departure goes overnight, and there is no direct flight, so the alternative is flying into Tuxtla Gutiérrez and taking an hour-long shuttle up the mountain.

With contactless switched off and the cards split between us, the trick that got us would not have worked. Nobody touched our bags on those later buses either. Better still, the screens stayed where they were supposed to.