Author: Natasha Frost / Source: Atlas Obscura
The modern pickpocket’s arsenal might include a signal jammer (you don’t want anyone calling the police) or surgeon’s tongs. His 18th-century Russian equivalent used a simple two-kopeck coin. Russian archaeologists found a specially modified coin while digging in a historic part of central Moscow, the BBC reported, the latest in a string of similarly illicit objects uncovered beneath the city’s streets.
It, of course, is no ordinary coin. The enterprising thief had hammered one edge flat, then filed it into a blade. This sharpened edge could then be used to slice open pockets, moneybags, or purses, and send their contents tumbling into the pickpockets’ waiting clutches. Known…
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