A Chilliwack woman is singing the praises of her community after she got her stolen wallet back with the help of some helpful retail heroes.
Holly Boucher posted the story to a popular Facebook page to say she recovered her bank card, ID as well as the stolen wallet itself.
She did it by following the trail of stolen purchases through her mobile banking app.
“Beware of this man,” she posted about the alleged thief’s blurry image, captured on CCTV footage.
The screenshot photo was given to her by an employee from one of the retail locations.
Boucher said someone stole the wallet on Friday or Saturday, and the alleged thief “spent hundreds of dollars before I even knew it was missing.”
She was told he bought it “off of a man who found it on the ground” near McCammon Elementary, near the reserve.
But regardless how he came to possess the wallet, the alleged thief went “around Chilliwack leaving a paper trail by using my card,” she wrote.
She knows because she tracked the transactions, which totalled just under $500.
That effort brought her to the Mobil gas station in the Superstore parking lot. There she acquired the photo from the CCTV footage.
Armed with a visual, they were just hoping the guy would use the card one more time.
“To my luck, he did, at Superstore.”
She spotted him about a minute later.
“My boyfriend and I confronted him immediately.”
She was joined outside by the store manager.
“We ended up recovering all of my banking cards, ID, licences, and the wallet itself.”
Boucher said a “bag of drugs” was mixed in with the stuff he dumped in front of her.
She tossed it back to him, saying she didn’t want his drugs, but said she needed the rest of her cards.
The police were called but they didn’t show up after an hour wait, she said.
Later, she reported the full suspect description to RCMP after hearing that he hopped a taxi headed for downtown Chilliwack.
“I would like to thank the owners of the Husky Gas Station on Yale Road, the workers at A&W on Yale Road, the man working night shift at Mobil gas station, and the manager of Superstore,” Boucher wrote in her thank-you post. “You all made it possible for me to recover some extremely valuable licences among other things that I cannot go without.”
She recovered both her driver’s licence as well as a restricted firearms licence, which she was worried would fall into the wrong hands.
“The community of Chilliwack really came together and helped us with everything they could. I am so appreciative and proud of our small city we call home. Thank you, truly.”
But there’s always a risk in confronting potentially dangerous individuals in a situation like that, warned the RCMP spokesperson.
“We recommend the public report an incident like this directly to RCMP first, and not after the fact, so we can deal with it appropriately,” said Sgt. Krista Vrolyk of the Chilliwack RCMP. “We don’t want the public putting themselves at risk confronting someone they don’t know, which could also compromise our investigation.”
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