I 100% believe this story to be true -- as mentioned above, he came to my store back in September and some records went missing during his visit. You guys seem concerned about UK libel laws so let's just call him ''. He came to the store two days in a row and was there for quite some time(probably 10 hours altogether) looking through the 45s eventually purchasing a decent amount of $1-5 45s.
There is a section high up on the wall(probably 7-8 feet from the ground) of the store where we have about 25 "rare" 45s displayed that are in varying states of unplayability(broken/cracked/warped/Z- condition/etc). It's not necessarily obvious to a customer that these records are destroyed but why else would we have records worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars just stuck on our wall? Anyhow, a few days after his visit I noticed something strange when I walked in -- there were 2 records up on that section of the wall that were not supposed to be there. Both were Tamla singles & had come from our dollar bin. We deduced that the 2 missing records were Nat Hall on Loop & Bobby Treetop on Tuff and that someone had climbed up on the racks, taken them off and replaced them with other 45s from the store which had the same color labels(yellow).
Of course, '' was the prime suspect from the jump -- he actually inquired about the Nat Hall while he was here and there were moments where he was unsupervised in the store enough to pull this off. Additionally, we do have video cameras in the store but I frankly couldn't be bothered to sit through ~10 hours of footage to find the one moment where he jumped up there and took them(especially considering that the records were essentially worthless). A few weeks later, the subject came up again in the store and it was theorized that he was probably showing the records off on social media(what else could you do with broken rarities?!) Sure enough, he had the Nat Hall 45 as his profile picture on his Facebook account! Of course, he was careful to cover up the broken part of the record in the photo.
He did go in and out of the store a number of times while he was here and on 2 occasions, brought boxes of records in to trade/sell(just like he did in the Ohio stores). The assumption is that he smuggled the records out with those boxes. He also requested to see more expensive 45s and was denied(thankfully). I did message him via FB afterwards and he denied knowing anything about it of course. Since it was mostly a matter of principle and I wasn't out any real money, I dropped the subject until I heard about these posts from the Ohio stores which I knew right away must be true.
