This man stole our laptop

All I can say, is some people, either have balls of steel, or are incredibly stupid.

At 3:30pm today, I asked one of the other guys at work to setup a new machine we’d had delivered, he goes out to do it, and noticed that one of the laptops we have on display is missing, which he thinks is odd, because if anyone was going to sell one they would have sold one of the ones we have out the back, so he comes and asks me if I had sold it, or lent it to anyone, yadda yadda. We search the shop, workshop and our store, and can’t find it anywhere, so we resort to the video camera footage.

So we’re searching through the footage, rewinding hour by hour, at 2pm, it’s not there, at 1pm, it’s not there, at 12pm, it’s not there, but at 11am, it bloody is there! So we watch from there on in. We have a lady that works out in the shop, mainly receipting stock into our POS system, sales, accounts, banking, that sort of thing, and she’s helping a couple of people at the counter, when this old dude, probably early 50s, walks in with a large coat on. I go out to serve him.

“Hey mate, anything I can help you with?”
‘Na, just in out of the cold waiting for the kids’
“No worries, I’ll leave you to it, if you need a hand with anything just sing out and one of us will come help you”
‘Thanks’

I go back out to the workshop, and think nothing of it. He walks around the shop a bit more, looks out the back to where he can see our security monitor, so he can see exactly what we’re recording, and then heads over to one of the laptops. He folds the lid down, then looks up at the counter where there’s still the couple and our retail lady are. He gets in between the line of view from those three and the laptop. He picks it up with one hand, walks away with it a bit, does a kinda swing around motion, and then slips it into his jacket, grabs his cell phone out of his pocket, and pretends to talk on it as he walks out of the shop!

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I was watching this, it was insane, there were four staff members plus two customers in the shop and this guy tries his luck, and gets away with it! He’s gotta be fucking stupid though, he blatantly looks towards the cameras on several occasions.

I called the police straight away and then looked at the footage a bit closer. 10 minutes before he walks into the shop, he walks past from right to left. 3 minutes before he walks in he walks back past, after he leaves a Mitsi Pajero pulls out of a car park and screams off, where it was parked would have been about 6 seconds walk from our front door, which is how long it was before it did pull out…

Two police officers pulled up about 45 minutes later. They took down all the details, took some stills away, and I’ve gotta drop the video footage into them. They seemed pretty determined to catch the guy, and seemed offended when I told them I didn’t expect much :P

The thing is, the laptop is a brand new model, and it had no battery in it, so it’s completely useless to the guy. You can’t get a generic charger that’ll fit/have a high enough wattage (Without some serious rangi’n), and the charger for it is also a new model, so any older HP/Compaq chargers will not fit, so this guy is fucked. Hewlett Packard are putting a flag on any spare batteries or chargers ordered, and are putting out notice to every HP dealer in the country (That’s pretty tops).

All and all, I’m pretty fucked off. We’re insured, so the money issue isn’t a big one (Although there is still a pretty decent excess). I’m not so pissed off that it happened “under my watch” so to speak, just pissed off that we were all here and he still managed to pull it off. It would have almost been worth him doing it, just so I could have caught him doing it.

Anyhow, the juicy stuff:

More pics
NX6325_Thief_low.wmv 18.5mb, 480×320, 2:33min long.
NX6325_Thief_Hi.wmv 37.4mb, 640×480, 2:33min long.

Laptop Details:

Make: Hewlett Packard
Model: Compaq NX6325
Serial: CNU623154T
Product Number: RE950PA
Part Number: RE950PA#ABG

AMD Turion Dual Core 1.6ghz, 512mb ram, 60gb hard drive, DVRW. 15″ LCD, Modem, Wireless, usual other laptop shit, RRP about $1900..