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While in Rome my wife was accosted by about a half dozen Gypsy children while we were site seeing by the Colosseum. Apparently this is an often used method to steal wallets from women's purses. They just surrounded her and put their hands all over her while one of them goes for the purse. I was close by and yelled at them loudly to get away from her and they just ran away probably looking for the next victim. We laughed about it later but it would not have been so funny if she had lost her passport etc..
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A popular method in Prague as well. There's a notorious gang of early-teenage Zizkovi (Roma from the Zizkov neighborhood in Prague) pickpockets that works Tram #24 in exactly such a way, usually going for the obvious tourists; ie lost-looking young people with backpacks. Sometimes the older kids resort to shoving people around or "accidentally" falling into someone and knocking them down as the tram accelerates or stops. The Roma thieves aren't usually people to be afraid of, just an expensive nuisance. A friend once had his car battery stolen, then found it for sale at the flea-market where we went looking for a replacement! The seller couldn't explain it, since M. had carved his name into the underside of the plastic case, but he still had to pay a 30Kc "finder's fee" to the fellow selling it. And practically everyone in Prague knows or knows of somebody who's had their brand-new Skoda surgically taken apart in a few hours by a gang of professional Gypsy parts thieves.