Watch: TV Crew Reporting 'Smash And Grab' Crime Gets Robbed

In an attempt to catch the “Smash and Grab” thieves who have been going rampant in California’s San Francisco, the Inside Edition crew set up a sting operation but in the process, got robbed themselves.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, 31,000 people reported "smash and grab" robberies in the city last year. And without many leads to go on and an increased level of difficulty in catching the culprits, the police ended up making arrests in just 550 incidents or roughly 1.8 percent of cases in 2017.

The stealing technique is so named because the robbers would repeatedly visit a collection of hotspots across the city like the beach or the bay, city landmarks and shopping areas with large parking lots, which are frequented by tourists. They would then shatter the car window and grab everything from inside the vehicle when it is left unattended and make a run for it.

Inside Edition employees decided to film such a robbery and in order to do so, left a car in one of the hotspots with a $250 speaker and a Michael Kors purse inside it. The two items were bugged with GPS trackers and as "[their] last trick," they also placed video cameras throughout the vehicle to capture the exact moment the thieves decide to make a move.

Their attempt was successful as an African-American man was seen breaking into a vehicle in the surveillance footage. The man grabbed the purse first and threw it over to a woman, who could be his partner in crime, before grabbing the speaker.

After the items were stolen, the Inside Edition crew, led by reporter Lisa Guerrero, tracked down the GPS signal from the speaker and located the duo heading into the train station. As the crew closed in on the pair, the woman took off in the opposite direction and hence, was not caught on camera.

Guerrero was seen in walking up to the man and saying, "You've got my speaker right there, you just broke into our car," adding, “We got it on camera."

The man initially refused to give back the speaker, trying to avoid getting recorded by the camera. At one point he even pushed the camera down. Then, Guerrero reminded the man that “five million people are going to see [him] steal that."

Eventually, the man was seen saying he was going to call his mother, after which Inside Edition cut to the moment Guerrero had the speaker back, explaining that the thief had decided to surrender it.

After that, the crew tracked down the purse, which was left abandoned in a trash bin a little way from the train station.

However, the unexpected moment came when the crew was interviewing an anonymous crime expert about the “smash and grab” robberies. In the middle of the interview, one of their cameramen filmed their own vehicle — parked outside the apartment where the interview was taking place – getting robbed.

After the crew analyzed the damage, Guerrero announced at the end of the segment that "thousands of dollars worth of equipment" were stolen from their vehicle.