This is the moment a shameless, cigarette-smoking yob breaks into an unlocked BMW and makes off with the owner’s Louis Vuitton bags – and hand creams and lip balms.
Samuel Fodil, 34, was blissfully unaware that he had left his £50,000 car unlocked as he lay asleep at his home on the busy North Road, Cardiff, in the early hours of Saturday, February 21.
He awoke ‘utterly devastated’ to find that the baby blue motor had been ransacked – and that the alleged thief had stolen some of his most prized possessions.
‘I woke up at around 6.30, checked my phone and noticed that my bank card had been used to book a taxi at about 4.45am,’ he tells the Daily Mail.
‘So I went to check for my wallet and, as I’m walking downstairs, I spotted a light on in my car. I opened the front door, looked through the window and saw all of my belongings scattered everywhere.
‘I was devastated. My lip balms, hand creams, tools for work and Louis Vuitton manbag were all gone. He had taken my wallet too.’
Footage captured by Mr Fodil’s Ring doorbell revealed that a man, pushing a bicycle by his side, had let himself into the vehicle through an unlocked door on the driver’s side.
The video then appears to show him scrambling around the car’s interior before creeping around to the boot, where he finds a suitcase filled with Mr Fodil’s tools for work.
Yet, it turns out, this was not the only motor the yob tried to break into under the cover of darkness.
CCTV filmed from the front door of another North Road home just moments before the BMW break-in shows him puffing on a cigarette while trying to gain access to a different vehicle. However, on that occasion, he was unsuccessful.
Almost three weeks on, South Wales Police are yet to make an arrest despite the existence of such clear footage and, incredibly, the fact that Mr Fodil almost managed to track down the perpetrator himself.
While on the phone to the bank that Saturday morning, the 34-year-old received a notification that someone was trying to use his card at Sainsbury’s on Whitchurch Road, just a couple of minutes away.
‘I got straight into my partner’s vehicle and drove straight to the store,’ he says. ‘I spoke to the woman behind the desk who told me that a man had just tried to use my card before heading down the street opposite.
‘I’m still on the phone to the police at this point and I’m telling them, “Look, I’m going to go and find him myself”.
‘I drove down the road and spotted him by the side of the road. I shouted, “Mate, you’ve just broken into my car”.
‘He dropped a can of Red Bull on the floor and I ran after him. We went down to a dead end and he jumped over a fence into a lane. I lost him. I stood there for 10 minutes on the phone to the police, soaked, and they arrived 15 minutes later. He was already gone.’
Mr Fodil spent the rest of the day sat helplessly at home waiting for the next ‘ping’ signaling yet another rogue outgoing from his bank account.
‘All I could do was sit there and watch the notifications come through,’ he recalls. ‘I phoned the police every time I got one.
‘I’m begging the officers to go and look for this bloke. They told me someone would call me back with an update. No one ever called.’
Fearing another theft, Mr Fodil is now considering leaving the Gabalfa area of Cardiff almost a decade after settling there.
‘I don’t feel safe anymore. If someone is rummaging around in my car outside, what’s stopping them coming inside and trying the front door? That’s my worst nightmare, being upstairs and there’s someone downstairs looking through and stealing my belongings.
‘This used to be a lovely little area. One person can ruin a community of hundreds of people – and it’s getting worse.’
A statement from South Wales Police read: ‘At 7am on February 21, South Wales Police received a report that a stolen bank card had been used in Sainsbury’s Whitchurch Road, Cardiff.
‘Officers attended and conducted a search, but the suspect had left the area. An investigation is ongoing.’
