Woman Arrested After Showing Off Alleged $500 Shoplifting Haul on TikTok

A TikTok influencer with over 355,000 followers was arrested for shoplifting $500 worth of merchandise from Target and posting her haul online for her followers to gawk at.

Her videos regularly rack up anywhere between 1 to 4 million views, which means she’s clearly making an enormous amount of money from TikTok’s Creators Program and does not need to be stealing shirts or whatever from Target. Save some petty theft for the poor people who need that stuff to get by.

Marlena Velez, a resident of Cape Coral, Florida, is one of those “Day in the Life” vlogger-style TikTokers. You know, the ones who show you their pristine, idyllic, enviable life that you don’t believe is pristine, idyllic, or enviable for a second.

Proving that to be true, she walked into a Target, snatched a bunch of stuff, and then, as part of her grand criminal scheme, instead of scanning her 16 items at the self-checkout register, she scanned a “false barcode” with lower prices.

That target location’s loss prevention employee watched Velez do this with around $500 worth of merch before walking out, thinking she had pulled off the heist of the century. She, of course, had not, in even the slightest way. The loss prevention employee sent her picture to the cops who posted it on social media asking if anyone knew who she was.

An anonymous tipster basically told the cops “Hey, I know that girl from the internet!” and sent the cops her Instagram handle which connected them to her TikTok page.

Upon reviewing Velez’s TikTok page, the cops found a specific video she had posted earlier the same day where she recorded herself shopping at Target putting all of the items she had stolen into her cart. The video is no longer on her page.

I would absolutely kill another human being for a mashup video of her original TikTok where she’s loading her cart with the stolen items intercut with Target’s security footage showing her stealing the items in the store and then parking lot security footage of her loading it into her car.

The 22-year-old was arrested and charged with petty theft before being released on a $150 cash bond.