A prolific smartphone thief has been identified after stealing a mobile while its owner was on a video call – allowing the owner to see the thief.
The victim had been walking within the Usaquen neighbourhood of Bogota, the capital of Colombia, on February 9 when their phone was snatched.
The video shows the suspect taking a look at the screen of the device after he stole it from its owner, who was waiting to cross the road at a pedestrian crossing.
The victim said: ‘He got here by on a motorbike and stole my phone. I had headphones on and I used to be capable of say that I had been robbed.
‘I got home as quickly as possible to lock down all of the confidential information I had on the device: my cards and every thing else.’
Because the video was published, many other people have come forward saying they were victims of the identical man.
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The suspect, despite wearing a motorbike helmet, was pictured after the phone owner managed to record the decision.
There have been no updates as as to if the police have arrested anyone or not but local media reports say that there have been over 129,000 thefts of this sort in Bogota in 2024.
Phone thefts are common in big cities – in London alone, some 78,000 people had phones or bags stolen from them on British streets as of March 2024.
That may be a rise of greater than 150% on the 31,000 ‘snatch thefts’ within the 12 months before, in accordance with data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales.
Figures also show that 4 in five police investigations were closed before a suspect was even found and just 0.8% of ‘theft from the person’ complaints resulted in a charge.
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