Authorities searching for serial thief who has hit more than two dozen SoCal Target stores
Police are searching for a serial burglar who has hit Southern California Target stores at least 25 times since April.
He's often been caught on camera, taking advantage of unwary employees and running out of the store before he can get caught, as evidenced by surveillance footage from one store in Santa Ana, where he grabs an iPad, still in the box, from the cashier and sprinting out of the front door.
"He's definitely prolific," said Irvine Police Department's Kyle Oldoerp. "He's hit a lot of locations."
Oldoerp says that the man has hit four different Target locations in Irvine alone. Footage from one store shows the man grabbing several packaged bed sheets before immediately going to the return counter.
Employees say that he claimed the items came from a gift registry, hence the lack of receipt and reason for his "returns."
"In one instance they asked him about the property and he said that the reason he has so many sheets is because he's running an Airbnb," Oldoerp said. "Definitely suspicious if a person is returning multiple items of the same thing."
The repeat issue has plagued Target Loss Prevention teams, who often pull up surveillance footage to see the same face looking back at them each time.
"Each loss is different" Oldeorp said. "Some are as low as five, six hundred dollars. Some are multiple thousands of dollars."
They say that some of his favorite items to steal are Dyson vacuums and Ninja knife sets.
So far, they estimate that the total loss exceeds more than $25,000.
