How me and AP got caught!
So me and AP were at our local shopping centre, it has a outside street area with shops and also a inside ‘mall’ type area. We went into a big chain music/entertainment store and we picked up some small key rings/badges, and two different DVD box sets.
AP de-tagged one of the box sets in store and the other had no obvious tag. We concealed and left and you guessed it, we beeped. We kept walking, pretending we hadn’t heard it. We walked all the way to the other side of the shopping centre and stopped to figure out what happened. No one chased/followed us so we thought we was okay.
We took the plastic wrap off of both of the DVD box sets, we took the boxes out of there cardboard cases and still nothing. Then finally we tried to open both of them. One opened with no problem, the other wouldn’t. This is where we fucked up.
There was a red security tag that stops you from opening the box.
This mother fucker. Me and AP had literally never seen this before, nor seen it mentioned in the community. So now we knew why we beeped.
We threw that box set in the bin, we couldn’t open it so there was no point keeping it. We went into our local second hand selling store and sold the other one for store credit.
We moved onto the shopping mall type place and went into a accessories store, AP got a bad vibe from the SA’s so we left and moved on, we were walking into our next store, witch was literally directly next to the accessories store.
Two large guys, one in a uv jacket stopped us and asked us to stop and talk to them. They asked if we had been to the music/entertainment store, we said yes. They said that we had set off the alarms on the way out and if they could check our bags. AP opened his and they scanned through and asked if we had our receipts, we said no. At this point they asked us to move to a corner of the store. They didn’t ask us any more questions, like at all. They didn’t even speak to us.
At this point I was certain the police would be called, and I had my fucking magnet in my pocket, so I discretely took it out and put it in my underwear, knowing full well they can’t strip search a minor.
They called over a different security guard, and an employee from the games store. They basically said ‘Look can you just give us the stuff back?’. AP gave up the key rings/badges he had. The security guard said that because we’d beeped we must have DVD’s/CD’s on us.
The thing is, we threw one of them away, and sold the other one, so we should have been in the all clear. But we had the receipt from selling the DVDs to the second hand store. One of the security guards asked 'oh is that a receipt?’ And AP just ignored him and shuffled things in his bag around.
He asked to check my bag and I gave them the key rings I had.They accepted that that was all we had.
The employee from the store left and the security guard said to AP 'Look mate, just don’t go back to (store name), and try not to do it next time’
And then they let us go. Like they just let us leave. They didn’t even ask our names.
Me and AP got off VERY lucky. I wanted to make this post so no one else makes the same mistake as us. I am also going to make a post about basically what I’ve learnt from this experience.
Me and AP won’t be lifting for a while, and 100% not at that shopping centre again. We will still be around in the community because I guess we will still be lifting small things (food etc), but no hauls for a few weeks.
