The travelling jewelry thieves have resurfaced in Abbotsford, but this time their victim got the better end of the scam.
Const. Ian MacDonald said a woman in her 70s was walking along her street one day last week when a dark sedan with two or three people pulled up beside her.
A woman in her 30s emerged from the vehicle and asked for directions to the hospital.
When the older woman provided the information, the younger one hugged her in apparent appreciation, and left with her companions.
Soon after, the senior woman realized that the necklace she had been wearing had been swapped with a different one.
“She determined it was a higher grade of gold than what she was wearing,” MacDonald said.
The woman turned over the necklace to the Abbotsford Police Department.
The scam, which was reported several times in Abbotsford in April and May, typically involves the thieves targeting people with expensive jewelry and, using distraction techniques and a sleight of hand, swapping their jewelry with cheaper costume pieces.
In this case, MacDonald surmises the culprits mistakenly used a real gold necklace instead of a fake one when they did the swap.
The previous cases also involved a dark sedan with a woman and two men.
In one incident, an elderly man had $4,800 worth of jewelry taken, including a necklace and a bracelet.