On a sunny morning on October 19 2025, four men allegedly walked into the world’s most-visited museum and left, minutes later, with crown jewels worth 88 million euros ($101 million). The theft from Paris’ Louvre Museum—one of the world’s most surveilled cultural institutions—took just under eight minutes.
Visitors kept browsing. Security didn’t react (until alarms were triggered). The men disappeared into the city’s traffic before anyone realized what had happened.
Investigators later revealed that the thieves wore hi-vis vests, disguising themselves as construction workers. They arrived with a furniture lift, a common sight in Paris’s narrow streets, and used it to reach a balcony overlooking the Seine. Dressed as workers, they looked as if they belonged.
This strategy worked because we don’t see the world objectively. We see it through categories—through what we expect to see. The thieves understood the social categories that we perceive as “normal” and exploited them to avoid suspicion. Many artificial intelligence (AI) systems work in the same way and are vulnerable to the same kinds of mistakes as a result.
The sociologist Erving Goffman would describe what happened at the Louvre using his concept of the presentation of self: people “perform” social roles by adopting the cues others expect. Here, the performance of normality became the perfect camouflage. //
Iphtashu Fitz Ars Tribunus Militum
18y
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Derecho Imminent said:
It could be argued that people ignored them not because of conformity, but because of class structure.
I think it largely is conformity. There are plenty of other examples of successful crooks/robberies/etc. that took advantage of conformity:
- The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art heist started with phony Boston Police officers knocking on the door.
- The Belfast Ireland bank heist in 2004 was similarly perpetrated by phony police officers
- Frank Abignale claims to have impersonated a pilot, a lawyer, and other professions to con people in the 1960s and 70s.
- The Banco Central Heist in Brazil involved a "gardening" business that opened up right next to the bank to hid the digging of a tunnel into the bank. It took 3 months to dig the tunnel.
All of these used social engineering tactics at different levels of class structure to perform their respective robberies. You can find plenty of other robberies along these lines with a little bit of effort.
