Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - This TikTok Star is going to jail - The Marlena Velez story

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

TikTok star Marlena Velez was caught allegedly shoplifting at a Target in Florida.

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Now her name's Marlina. She's 22. She's a mom who posts a lot of lifestyle stuff on her TikTok and Instagram. Like get ready with me's where she gets ready, I guess. And a lot of day in the life kind of stuff. She does sort of family vlog. She has her kids in her videos sometimes. And she's like always out buying clothes, trying them on,

seeing what looks good, showing them off in her videos. I mean, you get the point. She makes content. And over time, she has. built herself a nice little following, 450,000 people on TikTok. Not bad. And to her credit, girl is working hard, posting videos almost every day. But one day it all goes wrong. When she decides she's going to film a video of herself shopping at Target. And so she starts by filming herself getting ready, putting on perfume, then she heads over to Target. And there she films herself going in and

picking out a bunch of items to buy. But then she goes to the self-checkout and instead of scam the item she actually has in her cart, she allegedly scans the barcode for a much cheaper item and then pays that lower price. Which isn't a war crime, but it is shoplifting. So using this method, she ends up finessing about $500 worth of shit, allegedly. Then she films herself loading it all into the car, and she leaves and goes home, edits all the footage, and she posts it. Now she obviously doesn't post footage of her stealing or doing the barcode scam or whatever you want to call it. What she posts makes it look like a normal trip to target. But whatever, she gets away with it.

No one at the store seemed to notice or say anything. But about three weeks later, she goes back to the same target. But this time, she's not alone. She's with her boyfriend and their two kids. And so they go in and they do a bunch of shopping and when they're done, they head over to the self-checkout. and you can see her here, and there's her boyfriend, and there's their two kids hanging onto the cart. And here, it seems like Marlina is going to pull her little barcode switcheroo again, and she allegedly scans her cheaper barcodes to make it look like she's paying for these items,

but she puts much more expensive items in her bags, thus giving her a huge discount. Now, if you zoom in and slow down the footage, you can actually see something white in her hand there. Now I assume that is the barcode for the much cheaper item she's scanning over and over again. And to be fair, she's like really good at this. Like I barely notice, she can have to teach me how to do that. And of course, if you scroll a little to the left of the shoplifting, this appears to be her young kid standing like one foot away. And so allegedly this time she steals around $225 worth of stuff. Not as much as last time, but still illegal.

But anyway, then the whole family leaves the store, they go back home, and they probably think nothing of it because she got away with it again and I assume she goes right back to her regular life making her normal TikTok videos for her audience until here's the thing about Target Target ain't no punk they know people steal from them all the time this ain't their first rodeo in fact they apparently have security cameras looking down on every self-checkout station which is how we got this footage and Target also has loss prevention officers who review a lot of this footage. Sometimes it takes them a while to look at it,

like sometimes weeks, but I guess they really do actually look at it. And Marlina doing something like scanning cheaper barcodes is something that they'll definitely notice. So when those lost prevention officers review the footage from the first time we see her allegedly steal, they clearly see her scam $500 worth of discounts using that little cheap barcode trick. And so loss prevention calls the But police, they don't know who Marlina is. To them, she's just a random shopper. So what do they do? They go and post a screenshot of her from the surveillance footage that day on their Facebook and Instagram and they ask the public for help identifying this thief. And pretty quickly, someone sees the post and they recognize her. And they hit up police like, hey, I think I know who

that is. And they give them her Instagram handle. So police are like, sweet. And they go to her Instagram and from there they find her TikTok account and they start scrolling and boom they see the video she made of herself shopping that day and getting ready and putting on perfume and going to target picking out items and loading them all into her car and she just happens to be wearing the same outfit and same glasses so they know this is the woman from the screenshot of the surveillance footage the next day they track her down and bam they arrest her here's her mugshot And she's charged with petty theft. No big deal. But then it gets worse. So Marlina is released on bail. She goes home. But her arrest makes the news.

Which is pretty embarrassing. So I guess she feels like she needs to respond. And she makes a TikTok about it. Get ready with me to talk about the elephant in the room. But she says that. But then she doesn't really address any of it. Probably because it's an ongoing case and she doesn't want to incriminate herself, which is actually smart.

But if you're not. zoom in to the background of her video, you can see that she put up her own mugshot. So I guess that's the whole joke she's trying to make of addressing the drama without actually addressing the drama. But then, several days later, Target loss prevention officers are reviewing some previous footage again. And boom, what do they see? They see that surveillance footage of Marlina at Target the second time, scanning the cheap

barcodes at the self-checkout when she was with her boyfriend kids. So loss prevention calls police again. And Marlene is a repeat offender. So police know who she is and they know where she lives. They ain't got to look at her TikTok this time. And so they go to her house and they arrest her again. So I'm going to need you to put your hands behind your back. Wait what? Put your hands behind your back. Wait. Gee. Don't fight it. Don't fight it. Don't fight it. And here's a little more body cam footage of them putting her in the squad car. And also, bam, here's her mugshot. And she's charged with another count. of petty theft. You were talking about a TikToker subscribing to a life of crime. She was caught

stealing from a Target in Cape Coral not once, but twice. Let me just say this though. I generally talk about murders and scams and kidnappings and really big crimes. I don't talk about shoplifting. So I don't really care that someone lifted a bunch of stuff from Target, especially in this economy. I just think it's funny that she made a TikTok presenting herself as shopping as doing a target hall when she was actually allegedly stealing and her own TikTok got her busted. Come on, you've got to admit that that's at least a little bit funny. Okay, here's what's crazy though. She apparently isn't new to the shoplifting game. She also has a prior arrest in 2023 from stealing from Walmart and also in 2019 for stealing

her friend's car. So there seems to be a little pattern here. But at this point, girl, why not just embrace it. Why not just like work the shoplifting into your vlogs? Get ready with me while I steal some shit from T.J. Max. I mean, hell, I'd watch that. Anyway, while the petty theft may be a misdemeanor, this all happened in Florida. And in Florida, three misdemeanors equals a felony. So, home girl might get hit with a felony. Regardless, this is all alleged as she hasn't been to trial yet. But, you know, at the end of the day, she's probably going to be fine. Like, it's Target. And a huge shout out to leonardo.a.i for sponsoring this video. If you want to make really cool art for your videos or just for your life like this or like this, then sign up for leonardo.a.i.