On July 3, at about 9.55pm, several Indian tourists were entering the lift at their hotel in Old Klng Road, Kuala Lumpur to go to their rooms. Coming in with them were a Middle Eastern couple.

In the lift, the Middle Eastern couple started a conversation and enquired where the Indian tourists came from.

Confirming their status, the Middle Eastern couple praised Indian film actors and said they were great fans of Amitabh Bachan and that they were from Dubai.

Further, the Middle Eastern couple said they wanted to see how the Indian rupees looked like and also asked the Indian tourists to show it to them.

The Indian tourists were elated and obliged by showing their rupees and thereby exposing the US dollars they had in their wallets.

The Middle Eastern couple seeing the US dollars, then said, ‘Oh, you also have US dollars’ and asked for it to be shown to them to see what they looked like.

Within minutes, the man ruffled his fingers in the wallet and after that the Middle Eastern couple arrived at the ground floor and disappeared.

In a daze, the Indian tourist realised that US$250 was missing from his wallet. The Indian tourist later reported this natter to the hotel staff and was also able to identify the  Middle Eastern couple through the CCTV recording.

The hotel security offered to take the Indian tourist to the police station but he declined as he was flying off the next day.

Now, I would like to know - how is it unregistered hotel ‘guests’ can just go up to the hotel’s various floors?

And after the tourist had identified the intruders, why didn’t the hotel management not report this incident to the police themselves? Are our hotels safe from intruders?