This happened back in August but I figured I'd share it anyway since it might be a thing:
I took a flight from Kota Kinabalu to KL, traveling alone. I was sitting in a middle seat, with a man in business attire sitting in the aisle seat and the window seat empty. As the plane was about to pull away from the gate, a very gaudily dressed guy moved from a seat a few rows ahead to the window seat next to me and proceeded to behave very oddly, taking lots and lots of selfies and fidgeting a lot, moving to a seat a few rows back, then coming back to the seat next to me. This basically kept on going through the flight and I got pretty annoyed at him.
When we had landed in KL and were waiting to get off the plane I was standing with small my carry-on backpack on my seat (i.e. not quite in my direct sight) and the business suit guy involved me in a conversation. I was so happy for a non-crazy person to talk to me! That must have been the time the crazy guy went into the zippered pocket on top of the backpack and removed the pouch that had my passport, a credit card and various other things I could have done without losing. The backpack had been between my feet the whole flight, so this must have been their chance. (My assumption is that suit guy and selfie guy were working together.)
Moral of the story: If you don't want to spend a few extra days at the airport police station, your embassy and Malaysian immigration (a special kind of hell), keep your papers and valuables on your actual person, even on a plane. Also, have a copy of your passport, both on paper and as a scan in your email, maybe even take a photo of your immigration stamp. (Fortunately this mess happened during the last week of a one-month trip, not at the beginning of a RTW, so it was a lot of hassle but no major problem. And normally I had my papers in that pouch around my neck but they had checked passports in KK and I figured they would do it again in KL so why not keep things in the backpack for the short flight? Lesson learned.)
My sympathies, but it seems odd that crazy guy would draw so much attention to himself if he was trying to steal your stuff. Are you sure it didn't disappear at some other point?
Your always vunerable when just having boarded a flight because you have to keep all your documents at hand. What I try to do is when you are waiting to board the plane and you only need your boarding pass, sit down and put all your important documents in a locked bag.
PS Also lost my passport twice and know what a pain it is! So Im always extra careful now..
Can you ever be sure, barring CCTV or actually catching someone in the act? Air Asia said they didn't find it, the airport police and Lost&Found said nobody handed it in and my local police told me this would actually have been a fairly common modus operandi: distract (suit guy, as a welcome contrast to crazy guy) and grab (crazy guy). So who knows. I did have all my contact info including email and my Malaysian phone number in that pouch so if I had somehow dropped it, it would have been very easy to let me know.
In any case, at least I was in a city with an embassy, I had that passport copy, all the necessary info to cancel my stolen credit card, another credit card to use while in Malaysia and just enough time so I didn't have to buy a new ticket (Emirates said they wouldn't be able to rebook me for another 4 weeks, which neither my employer nor my bank account would have enjoyed at all). It could have been a lot worse.
Well...
In order to be allowed to leave the country you need to prove that you haven't overstayed so you need a piece of paper proving this. To get it you need to go to the Immigration office in Putra Jaya. It's a bit of trek out there and the building is not terribly easy to find. I went there right after I had been given the necessary papers by my embassy and arrived during the lunch break, which meant the "gatekeeper" desk was unstaffed. For a good 90 minutes. While lots and lots of people arrived, forming an orderly line (not - it was a zoo, really, one large, very crowded room with few seats).
The gatekeeper listens to your situation and decides which window/counter you should go to. In any case, eventually he arrived and everybody else was very assertive in trying to get his attention. People were shoving and yelling. After a while he gave me a number. Then I waited at the first counter (paperwork), the second counter (payment), the second counter again (picking up the receipt) and finally the third counter (picking up all my papers). People did stare a fair bit (I - a blonde woman - and a black guy were the only Westerners, most people seemed to be maids and laborers), there was nowhere to sit (even pretty pregant women were standing for hours), I had no idea how the process worked since gatekeeper guy was too busy to even ask (and once he had given out enough numbers he simply disappeared). Also I was hungry and tired and really, really nervous that somehow things would go wrong and with no idea of how everything worked it was not a pleasant situation to be in.
I chatted with one Malaysian woman from Penang who was there to help her maid get her work visa renewed but other than that, it was a very solitary experience, some 5 hours all told but it felt much longer.
It all worked out in the end and I was thrilled that there was a bus going straight to KL from the street corner and believe me, my paperwork was never more than 2mm from my body. :-)
Thanks for taking the time to reply in such detail. The picture you paint is indeed very similar to that which prevails in immigration offices in Indonesia, with which I am very familiar. Hundreds of locals waiting around, at the mercy of all powerful officialdom.
In Indonesia though foreigners get looked after pretty well now with a separate section for visa extensions.
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