Woman stole £500 worth of sex toys and condoms from Boots
A shoplifter who stole £500 worth of sex toys and condoms from Boots has been jailed.
Carla McLay, 31, made a beeline for the sexual wellbeing aisle at the store in Middlesbrough and helped herself to the goods on January 2.
Teesside Magistrates’ Court heard police have no idea where she hid them all and none have been recovered.
McLay pleaded guilty to theft from a shop but claimed she thought the haul only totalled around £100.
Her lawyer Daniel Burke told the court he had Googled Boots’s most expensive range of condoms and come up with a price of £10.99.
McLay was handed a 26-week sentence for five other shop thefts on January 20.
The court heard she has more than £3,000 to pay in outstanding court fines.
She was given a concurrent 12-week sentence and ordered to pay £250 in compensation.
McLay’s isn’t the adult-themed theft to have made headlines this week.
On Wednesday night, a group of masked men raided a sex toy factory near Seville, Spain, making off with a haul worth more than £15,000 that included 24-karat gold vibrators.
The men also plundered £23,000 from a safe at the industrial estate, where they’d cut electricity cables in order to carry out the heist under cover of darkness.
A spokesperson for Dreamlove, the erotic items wholesaler that owns the premises, told local media the culprits would have trouble selling the sex toys on the black market because they are ‘rare and easily identifiable products.’
Meanwhile in Australia, the owner of a Queensland adult shop was recently surprised to find their ‘largest tester’ missing from the store’s display.
CCTV footage showed a man grabbing the dildo earlier in the day, seemingly eyeing the $200 (£115) price tag, before pocketing the item, idling round, and finally leaving.
These thefts pale in comparison to a 2019 incident in Northamptonshire, however, in which thieves made off with more than £1 million worth of sex toys stolen from a truck in a lay by while the driver slept.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.