LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — An employee of Burke’s Furniture is out nearly $1,500 dollars after her wallet was stolen from her purse, inside the Richmond Road location. From there, the persons of interest hit a few Lexington businesses buying up gaming systems.
“Things that you could very easily sell on the street,” said Detective Mark Thomas from the Lexington Division of Police, of the types of items that were purchased fraudulently. “We really wish people would be asking for identification with these credit cards, especially when you have these higher dollar purchases,” Thomas added. “You could really be saving someone a lot of trouble and helping to put bad guys out of business, by simply asking the question to see if the i.d. matches what’s on the credit card.”
Detective Thomas, who leads the department’s Crime Stoppers unit has seen more cases similar to this one than he can remember, but with a child visible on surveillance cameras, this one makes him wonder. “It does speak to a person’s character to commit a crime, a felony crime, with a child present,” he said.
It's a time of year when police usually see a spike in this type of crime, as people get desperate during the holiday shopping season. “There’s not a lot of things they’re not willing to do, even in front of their children,” said Thomas.
But securing your own belongings, along with conducting those identification checks at the check-out line are things we can do to minimize the frequency of these crimes.
