This TikTok Star is going to jail - The Marlena Velez story

0.109 - 21.701 Narrator

So this TikTok mommy vlogger might just be looking at a felony. Now her name's Marlena. She's 22. She's a mom who posts a lot of lifestyle stuff on her TikTok and Instagram, like get ready with me's where she gets ready, I guess. And a lot of day in the life kind of stuff. She does sort of family vlogs. She has her kids in her videos sometimes.

21.841 - 40.298 Narrator

And she's like always out buying clothes, trying them on, seeing what looks good, showing them off in her videos. I mean, you get the point. She makes content. And over time, she has built herself a nice little following, 450,000 people on TikTok. Not bad. And to her credit, girl is working hard, posting videos almost every day.

40.518 - 56.971 Narrator

But one day, it all goes wrong when she decides she's going to film a video of herself shopping at Target. And so she starts by filming herself getting ready, putting on perfume, then she heads over to Target. And there she films herself going in and picking out a bunch of items to buy.

57.171 - 78.962 Narrator

But then she goes to the self-checkout and instead of scanning the items she actually has in her cart, she allegedly scans the barcode for a much cheaper item and then pays that lower price. Which isn't a war crime, but it is shoplifting. So using this method, she ends up finessing about $500 worth of . Allegedly.

79.282 - 101.333 Narrator

Then she films herself loading it all into the car and she leaves and goes home, edits all the footage, and she posts it. Now she obviously doesn't post footage of her stealing or doing the barcode scam or whatever you want to call it. What she posts makes it look like a normal trip to Target. But whatever, she gets away with it. No one at the store seemed to notice or say anything.

101.693 - 122.744 Narrator

But about three weeks later, she goes back to the same target. But this time, she's not alone. She's with her boyfriend and their two kids. And so they go in and they do a bunch of shopping, and when they're done, they head over to the self-checkout. And you can see her here, and there's her boyfriend, and there's their two kids hanging onto the cart.

123.084 - 145.468 Narrator

And here, it seems like Marlena is gonna pull her little barcode switcheroo again. And she allegedly scans her cheaper barcodes to make it look like she's paying for these items, but she puts much more expensive items in her bags, thus giving her a huge discount. Now, if you zoom in and slow down the footage, you can actually see something white in her hand there.

145.748 - 168.013 Narrator

Now, I assume that is the barcode for the much cheaper item she's scanning over and over again. And to be fair, she's like really good at this. Like I barely noticed. She got to teach me how to do that. And of course, if you scroll a little to the left of the shoplifting, this appears to be her young kid standing like one foot away. And so allegedly this time she steals around $225 worth of stuff.

170.014 - 192.747 Narrator

Not as much as last time, but still illegal. But anyway, then the whole family leaves the store. They go back home and they probably think nothing of it because she got away with it again. And I assume she goes right back to her regular life, making her normal TikTok videos for her audience. Until... Here's the thing about Target. Target ain't no punk.

192.928 - 215.739 Narrator

They know people steal from them all the time. This ain't their first rodeo. In fact, they apparently have security cameras looking down on every self-checkout station, which is how we got this footage. And Target also has loss prevention officers who review a lot of this footage. Sometimes it takes them a while to look at it, like sometimes weeks, but I guess they really do actually look at it.

215.919 - 238.45 Narrator

And Marlena doing something like scanning cheaper barcodes is something that they'll definitely notice. So when those loss prevention officers review the footage from the first time we see her allegedly steal, they clearly see her scam $500 worth of discounts using that little cheap barcode trick. And so loss prevention calls the police, but police, they don't know who Marlena is.

238.57 - 260.781 Narrator

To them, she's just a random shopper. So what do they do? They go and post a screenshot of her from the surveillance footage that day on their Facebook and Instagram, and they ask the public for help identifying this thief. And pretty quickly, someone sees the post and they recognize her. And they hit up police like, hey, I think I know who that is. And they give them her Instagram handle.

260.961 - 284.384 Narrator

So police are like, sweet. And they go to her Instagram. And from there, they find her TikTok account. And they start scrolling. And boom, they see the video she made of herself shopping that day and getting ready and putting on perfume and going to Target, picking out items and loading them all into her car. And she just happens to be wearing the same outfit and same glasses.

284.664 - 308.566 Narrator

So they know this is the woman from the screenshot of the surveillance footage. The next day, they track her down and bam, they arrest her. Here's her mugshot. And she's charged with petty theft. No big deal. But then it gets worse. So Marlena is released on bail. She goes home. But her arrest makes the news. Which is pretty embarrassing, so I guess she feels like she needs to respond.

308.766 - 310.708 Narrator

And she makes a TikTok about it.