How do you catch a thief?

Taiwan Living in Taiwan
1

This is getting ridiculous. Nobody seems to be doing anything about it so I’m looking for constructive ideas.

I swim 2-3 times a week at a very nice indoor pool. Have been doing this for over a year, fairly uneventfully. In October the old open shelf arrangement was replaced with $10 lockers, and signs went up warning people about theft. I figured that a year without incident was a sign that the danger was being hyped up to bring in more money. After all, my bag and clothes won’t fit in in one locker, and to get your shampoo out between swimming and showering means paying again.

But on a whim I carried my wallet and phone down to the pool with me - and returned to find my bag and clothes gone.

They were in a shower cubicle, having been ransacked, and I’ve now got used to wandering round checking the showers, toilets, etc., to find my stuff. So far I’ve lost NT$32, which is less than I would have spent on lockers, and found several other sets of clothes and bags - all minus cash, cards and phones. It happens an average of once a week.

This guy, or gang, has a consistent MO and it should be easy enough to catch him. No security cameras in the changing rooms, but surely we could watch to see who goes in and out all day?

Why not just hire some poor old git to sit around all day keeping watch?

Or leave a wallet full of indelible dye (or razorblades) lying around? Bear trap in your bag?

Could you do something with RFID tags to quietly notify the SWAT team when a bag is lifted and where it has gone?

Solutions, people. Bitching ain’t gonna do no good. I need something i can propose to the management, or something I could get away with alone without fear of prosecution.

2

Bag full 'o mousetraps/use a locker.

Did you walk back to Xindian in your Speedoes?

4

crimescene.com/store/index.p … ucts_id=48

crimescene.com/store/index.p … ucts_id=76

5

Some siren thing in your bag that will be set off when your bag is moved.

6

A hand grenade booby trap.

Oh, wait, you’re only going to catch boobies that way.

Well, maybe you WANT boobies.

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7

Hehe, that would be ACE! I mean, just as a toy. I would put it in my muesli box and catch my stinking Alpen thieving housemate.

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8

why don’t you just live in the kitchen? camp bed on the floor, etc. easy to arrange, I’m sure.

9

How about just putting one of your extra-lurid gay porn mags in your bag and then catching him in flagrante delicto, dick in hand?

10

He shouldn’t be pleasuring himself while a crime is being committed, surely? Stick to the matter at hand, sandman.

11

Hey, I wasn’t even kidding this time. They’re readily available. This one for example:
https://www.futureinstore.com/FIS-web%20folder/images/BagPro.htm

12

Now THAT’S worthy of an Eeeeeeew! Just you keep Loretta’s thief’s matter-encrusted hand out of this thread.

13

Dude thats lo-tech, try one of these bad boys:

https://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=3418

14

I thought of that.

“I opened the wrong locker by mistake, and it started making this noise.”

No crime has been committed at that point. You have to let him take it and nail him when he has no excuse. Something with a delay. And a siren warms him to run before you come out of your hiding place.

If he has a piranha dangling from his bloody hand then he’s clearly guilty. I like the idea of razorblades in a wallet, but expect I’d either get prosecuted or else forget and catch myself. Sprung noose on the neck of the bag? Clothes soaked in indelible dye? And some kind of radio signal alarm to summon 2 big guys armed with big sticks?

15

Ha, that’s totally stupid. Seriously, here’s what it says at your link.

A lot of good an SMS will do when Loretta’s out swimming laps.

I like the razor blade idea.

16

John Napier, the inventor of logarithms, went went out dressed in black and took a big black cock out with him. Once he had stuff go missing and he was sure it was one of his servants but didn’t know which one.
So he put his big black cock in a dark room and told his servants to stroke his cock one by one and his cock could tell who the thief was. (servants weren’t too bright)
But… he had covered his black cock in soot, the innocent servants felt safe to stroke his cock because they know they didn’t do it, they had dirty hands. The one with clean hands was the guilty party.

Could you use a technique like that?

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17

And you would hear the siren if you were doing laps? i think you would wait around the corner and when they take your bag you’d go and tap them on the shoulder.

I thought that was pretty obvious.

18

Which was why it was stated in the post you quoted!

19

If you want to thrash him, just wait in a cubicle with a can of pepper spray and your best steel toe boots on… If you want the arsehole brought to a more conventional form of justice the only way forward is a video camera stealthily placed… sans hard evidence this is the kind of thing that goes nowhere fast under “Taiwan law”, video evidence however makes for very little paper work for the rozzers… Get a local to proffer the damning tape instead of an untrustworthy big-nose and you’ll really see the wheels of Taiwanese justice grinding at a moderate pace… :idunno:

20

Who comes in & doesn’t swim before leaving or seems to take waaay too long to change clothes? Does the front desk guy get up entirely too often to “use the bathroom”? Any thievery in the ladies locker room?? (Best get cameras installed, asap!).

Wait - cameras require money and an added amount of “give a crap” from the owners to look at the tapes … they’d never go for it.

Be careful in your snooping - people might think YOU’RE the thief!

21

Loretta doesn’t have a cock. He has Brian.
I think you should get some big sucker-type things that you could attach to your hands and feet, allowing you to crouch naked, suspended from the ceiling like some kind of fat pink hairy spider – people seldom look up, you see – and then you could pounce on the thief and embrace him in a hairy embrace of sweaty asphyxiation.