A CF caught in the act

[Kinelll]

I have a plant pot outside my front door and a couple of little garden ornaments sitting next to it, a zebra and a gnome. My children picked them and consider them to be theirs.

I spotted somebody loitering so opened the blinds and caught an elderly lady red handed putting the zebra in her bag.

To be honest I'm surprised they've lasted as long as they have around here but I didn't expect the culprit to be an elderly woman😂

I once spent an afternoon planting bedding plants in my front garden. Next morning the whole lot were gone! Some CF had dug them all up and taken them away. Just unbelievable.

Glad you caught your CF!

😲 well done for calling her out! Who does that, thinks oooh, I like that - I'll take it!

Someone swiped a Christmas wreath off our front door many years back, I was really miffed, it was bloody lovely. Still irks me to this day

Dust heads do this on the local estate. They have those big shopper bags full of anything random they can pick up from little ornaments to solar lights. Assume they sell them somewhere but I’ve been amazed by the stuff they take sometimes.

I have nothing in my front garden other than paving slabs and a bush that is too big to dig up. Bitter experience. I remember someone stole our christmas wreath off our front door when I was a kid so I have never bothered with one as an adult.

An elderly lady was seen on CCTV stealing my purse from my bag in a charity shop! Then, a week later the charity shop called me to say they'd found my driving licence, disabled bus pass and loyalty cards, all wrapped up in an elastic band, shoved in a shoe in the shop!

I was so upset I loved that Radley purse

Before I get asked, yes I did report it to police - it was them who viewed the CCTV - but obviously nothing came of it

I always love the first few comments on CF threads..."So what what did you do/say to her/him/them when you challenged them OP?" just in case the OP didn't immediately rush headlong into resolving the issue as it unfolded.

I like it when the OP did just that - nice one, OP

Brilliant outcome! Wow, the utter shamelessness

Cheeky old bastard! You’re a better person than me,I’d have given her a right bollocking

Love your username. Just finished the series.

This is a double CF story, I guess…
My mum (who was in her early 60’s at the time, but due to a lifetime of anorexia and chain-smoking, looked a hell of a lot older) had her purse nicked out of her handbag at the supermarket. Because she was an utter idiot and we’d been ignoring our warnings for years, she had her PIN number on a post it note attached to her card. 🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️. The thief withdrew the maximum daily amount (not insignificant - mum was quite wealthy) and because she’d been dumb enough to leave the pin on the card, she couldn’t claim it back from the bank. Anyhow, she was interviewed on the local TV news which she loved, but instead of it being a story about her being an victim, it was a warning about people being dumb enough to leave their PIN numbers attached to their cards. She was aLao absolutely INCENSED when they referred to her as an “elderly” woman, and threatened to sue them for “dreadful, gutter journalism”!
The thief was caught on CCTV, but never ID’d - a well-dressed, middle-aged woman who looked about as far removed from any predictable demographic as you could imagine, was a lucky CF who got away with the theft of $10000Aud and wasn’t really vilified on tv as much as she should have been because although my narcissistic mum was stupid, she was a vulnerable target. I do hope this woman was caught out eventually.

Remember those fake tins of sweets from joke shops where a sprung snake thing burst out when you took the lid off? Squeeze one of those shanked under each ornament it would give the thief a bit of a fright as it flew out

Some people are shameless!! 😲

Luckily no one has ever touched anything in my garden.

Back in the 1990s the pub I worked in had a radio for making it quicker to contact the police if we had any 'trouble'. It used the same frequency as the local shopping centre's security. On quiet days we used to listen to them following shoplifters, etc. The vast majority of shoplifters were pensioners and they would never detain them or call the police, they would just follow them in the hope that they wouldn't take any more things in front of a security guard. If it was a younger person they'd call the police and swoop in en masse to arrest them. I should think if you keep getting away with it, you keep doing it.

Years ago my local mini mart had problems with shoplifting , it was two ladies that came in at separate times, he eventually found out what was going on when he went yo the pub and found both ladies together selling his produce , it still had his shops price stickers on them !
Both ladies were in their 70s

No way!! Oh my goodness 🤣

My BIL and SIL live in a very well to do village in a very well to do part of the country. Every year their village hosts an Open Gardens event for charity and every year someone is found digging up plants or taking cuttings in one of the gardens. It is almost always little old ladies!

thieves get older, they dont change
shocking though

CF

Don’t you mean “thief”

I did have an embarrassing moment many years ago.

I was passing someone's garden and right in the front next to the path was a dandelion of enormous size.

As a guinea pig owner I couldn't go past it (have you any idea how much those things eat?), and pulled it up and put it in my shopper, only to hear a furious banging on the window of the house. Looked up and there was an elderly woman there - obviously furious. (Who can blame her).

I went to the door to apologise and to show her my "spoils" as proof. She was OK with it.

I did feel embarrassed, though, and never did it again no matter how much the dandelion harvest.

As a victim, I have also suffered the theft of a stone sparrow. I am pretty sure that it was stolen by two little girls (aged about 7-8) who often passed the garden and would sit on the wall outside, close to my sparrows (I had two) looking very shifty. After one disappeared they never sat on the wall again (I moved the other to a less vulnerable position).

I never confronted them with their iniquity as I had no actual proof, butI hope that they fought like cats over that single sparrow and it destroyed their friendship, the little horrors. They are probably shoplifting Malden Salt and Manuka Honey from Waitrose by now - they'll be about 40.

@Emotionalsupportviper It's posts like yours that make me wish there was a like button - I'm going to be smiling about dandelions and Maldon salt all morning.

i used to pick dandelions, a lady in the local shop saw my spoils and told me they used to sew dandelion seeds! for their guineapigs

Agreed. This is on par with victim blaming.
Sometimes confrontation isn't the best. My neighbour was sent down for 8 years for running over a man who confronted him stealing his car. I wouldnt have confronted the lovely twat (who had a dog called Lucifer and a kid called Merlin) for anything.

I love these posts that are so quick to try and catch the OP out because they didn’t specifically say in their OP that they did or said anything to the CF. I bet saying ‘use your words OP’ was on the tip of your tongue 😂 OP didn’t even mention banging on the window in their post.