Indian Man Arrested For Stealing 120 Television Sets From Hotels

Police arrested an Indian man who allegedly stole 120 televisions from hotels across southern India over a span of four months, reports said Wednesday. The arrest was made earlier in November while the man was trying to sell a TV set to a shopkeeper, who alerted the police.

According to police, Vasudev Nanaiah booked into budget hotels with oversized bags or suitcases to put the TV. If the TV in the room did not fit in his bag, the 34-year-old man would go out to a local market to buy a bigger suitcase, police in Bengaluru in the state of Karnataka, India said. Deputy Commissioner of Bengaluru police Chetan Singh Rathor said, "If Nanaiah's suitcase was too small, he would assess the size of the TV set in the room and get a new one.”

"He would walk in and out of the hotel on some pretext so many times that the hotel reception would not realise when he had walked out with the TV never to return,'' Rathor added.

Rathor also told BBC Hindi's Imran Qureshi that hotel staff never suspected Nanaiah as he was a "decent and well-behaved" guest. Nanaiah also reportedly paid a small advance sum and told staff he would be staying for several days at the hotel but generally left early, the police officer said.

He was also arrested earlier in October while stealing a TV from a hotel but was sent out on bail. Police alleged that he went back to stealing within a few days of leaving prison.

Police said they already recovered around 20 stolen television sets and found that he had left about two dozen cases in neighboring states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, which were believed to have been used in the theft in the past four months.

Nanaiah reportedly told officials that he stole TVs because it was "relatively low risk and easy," according to the police. "He said that his recent thefts went to fund his lawyer and legal fees for previous TV theft charges in different courts," Rathor said, according to NDTV India.

Similar incidents have taken place around the world earlier.

In August this year, a serial thief in Ireland who stole four TVs worth €1,500 ($1773) from a supermarket was arrested and sentenced to 16 months in prison after he admitted to a series of theft charges. The thief also admitted to stealing several steaks and chocolates from other areas in Ireland. He was addicted to crack cocaine and heroin and had done "everything possible" to get clean, his lawyer had said, according to Independent.ie.

Earlier in the year in January, a man, who stole a television remote from an apartment complex in Wheaton, Illinois, was sentenced to more than two decades behind bars. Eric Bramwell was found guilty in November, 2016 and was sentenced in January to 22 years imprisonment. The 35-year-old man had stolen the remote in August 2015 from the common area of the apartment complex but accidentally dropped a glove on his way out. The DNA sample it matched that of Bramwell's on the state’s database of convicted felons and thus his criminal history led to the sentencing, the Independent reported at the time.