If you had someone steal from your business, you would probably do everything you could to catch the thief.

That might mean deciding to install security cameras like the owners of the company in today’s story.

When the security company employee talked to the owners, he devised a plan that confirmed his suspicions about who was stealing.

Let’s see how it all plays out.

MC to catch a thief… or 3.

My uncle (now retired) told me this story, it happened probably around 2005-10, something like that.

He used to work for a security company, the kind that handles factory security, night guards, access and perimeter alarms, that kind of job.

He was the senior manager of the team, handling the night shift for important clients as well as surveilling the original installation of the security equipment for those clients.

The 3 owners at this company are very suspicious of each other.

He gets called to do an installation on a factory that has been having a lot of theft.

He goes there and interviews the 3 owners separately.

Each one has a 30 something % stake on the company.

The company is old and whatever chemistry those 3 originally had is long long gone.

Each one voices his suspicions that the thefts are inside jobs and each one even implies that they suspect the other two of being behind the thefts.

All 3 owners claimed to want the same thing.

Also, all 3 adamantly say that “they want to know where the cameras are and they want the thieves caught ASAP as cheaply as possible”.

Uncle vows to comply but says that, if they want to be cheap about it, there might be some blind spots that they can’t cover.

All 3 owners are OK with that.

This Uncle is sneaky!

Uncle always told me that the one thing he learnt on that job is that Dr. House was right: “EVERYBODY LIES”.

So he decides to do the job with a little bit of maliciousness.

All 3 owners said they wanted to know where the cameras where, all 3 said they wanted to be as cheap as possible.

So uncle and his team install 3 hidden cameras that, as a whole, cover the whole factory floor, but they budget for 2.

He gave the owners different information.

The service is, apparently, a bit overpriced so they still make money out of it and there’s a bonus for catching the thieves.

However, uncle tells each owner the location of two of the three cameras separately.

To owner 1, he tells the location of cameras 1 and 2, but not 3.

To owner 2, location of cameras 1 and 3.

To owner 3, location of cameras 2 and 3.

What about the blind spots?

They all ask for blind spots.

Uncle tells them where they are regarding the cameras each one of them has been told, but those blind spots are covered by the camera each owner knows nothing about.

Oh, each owner said they wanted to catch the thiefs ASAP as well.

Well, that uncle did.

He caught the thieves.

He caught EACH ONE OF THE OWNERS using their expected “blind spots” to sneak into the factory “undetected” and gather some inventory for themselves DURING THE FIRST WEEK.

AFAIK, the factory changed ownership and uncle continued providing security for the new owners.

What happened to the old ones, I don’t know but I suspect nothing good.

Those owners had a lot more in common than they realized!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

It would’ve been interesting to see the owners’ reactions.

The owners definitely gave themselves away.

This person was suspicious of the owners the whole time.

It might be a funny movie.

The cameras don’t lie!

Let’s get Hollywood involved for the film adaptation.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.