The crew with the television program “Inside Edition” who baited “smash and grab” culprits in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, for their journalistic investigation ended up as victims of a real robbery, with thieves stealing their equipment worth thousands of dollars, Fox News reported.
Attempting to portray the picture of the rising incidences of the aforementioned type of robberies in the area, the crew filmed themselves planting GPS trackers inside a number of items, a $250 speaker and a purse, before placing them in a visible place inside a car parked nearby.
The bait, unsurprisingly, worked, with a man smashing open the car’s back window, pulling out the speaker and handing over the handbag to a woman, his accomplice. When the man from the duo hurriedly walked into a train station, the crew approached him, with anchorwoman Lisa Guerrero addressing him.
"You've got my speaker right there, you just broke into our car," she said telling the man they’ve “got it on camera.”
Shying away from the camera lenses, the robber, even having been told “five million people are going to see him steal that,” refused to give back the speaker, but instead said he would call his mother, who by that time had already ditched the tracked stolen purse into a garbage can.
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As if by a twerk of fate, while the exchange with the man was taking place, some other thieves broke into the television crew’s actual car via the "smash and grab" method, taking most costly valuables from there, that is the cameramen’s equipment.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, in 2017, over 31,000 people reported “smash and grab” robberies across city.