This is the moment a heartless thief took advantage of the moment and grabbed a woman’s cellphone from out of her hand as she and a friend were trying to take a selfie.
A CCTV camera managed to take footage of the crime in Jalandhar in Punjab, India as can be seen below:
[rumble video_id=v661nh domain_id=u7nb2]
Video credit: Rumble
The incident happened last month and in the footage, two women can be seen as they stand near a busy main road. They can be seen leaning on the hood of a black car as they clearly pose for a selfie.
Some reports say that the women were standing outside a car showroom and were presumably taking a selfie to celebrate the purchase of a new vehicle.
In a classic selfie pose, the women start to lean toward each other while the woman on the left raises her phone in front of their faces. They take a couple of snaps but then, seemingly out of the blue, a thief on a motorbike and wearing a red hoodie almost casually plucks the phone from the woman’s hand before speeding away on his motorbike.
The women can only look about in stunned confusion as one of them raises her hand to her mouth. Sympathetic staff members from the dealership then jog out to check if the women are okay and then gesture towards the direction the thief drove to in order to explain what had happened. At this point, the video ends.
In the greater scheme of things, it’s good that it’s only the phone that was stolen and that they are safe from harm. But on the other hand, even the lower-end smartphones still cost a decent amount of money to buy so its loss is going to sting. Perhaps what even hurts more is all the contacts, videos, pictures, and other data that the woman might have already stored on their phone although this loss would be mitigated if most of her data was uploaded to the cloud.
Nevertheless, it’s a clear lesson to always be careful of one’s surroundings. While it’s true that the thief may have just been opportunistic and happened to grab the woman’s phone on a whim, it’s also highly likely that he was on the lookout specifically for such easy marks.
So the best way to stay safe is not to become such a mark in the first place. This means being careful when one chooses to pull out something valuable (not just a cellphone) and to always be aware of one’s surroundings so that one doesn’t present an easy target. Criminals always want the easy targets where they don’t have to exert much effort to pull off their caper as in the woman’s case.
Replaced!