An enterprising young couple who felt let down by lazy cops took it on themselves to nick the natter who had been nicking their knickers, according to Spa!

"My girlfriend, who lives alone, was getting pestered by a stalker who was also stealing her underpants. She went to the police and made a complaint, but all they said was that they'd increase patrols in her neighborhood and that was it, so the two of us decided to take matters into our own hands," Tatsuya Sasayama, a pseudonym, tells Spa!

Judging by the contents of letters and phone calls the stalker had made to Sasayama's girlfriend, it appeared as though the perpetrator was listening in on her.

Sasayama and his girlfriend called in a surveillance expert, who found a listening device secreted into a power point in the woman's apartment. But instead of removing it, the couple pretended it wasn't there and instead used the bug to feed the stalker disinformation.

"We conducted a thorough search over a radius of 300 meters from my girlfriend's place. We learned that you needed to be close to her home to pick up any transmissions from the bug," Sasayama tells the weekly. "While we were doing this, we saw the same suspicious bloke lurking in his car near her apartment a number of times."

Sasayama rigged up a fake security camera near the entrance to his girlfriend's apartment and then recorded a message for her answering machine to imply to callers that she was not living alone. He then set up a real camera focused on his girlfriend's laundry so they could get footage of the panty snatcher in the act.

"We set it up so that as soon as any underwear was plucked from a clothes peg, it would set off this piercing anti-crime buzzer," Sasayama says.

With the trap set in place, the 22-year-old and his girlfriend only needed to wait for the panty thief to strike. It took three days.

While staking out their homemade panty trap in the dark, eventually they heard someone shuffling around near her laundry — and then the shrill squeal of the alarm as the panties were snatched.

"I raced out of the front door and jumped on top of the guy, who was stunned immobile by the noise of the alarm, and pinned him on the ground," Sasayama tells Spa!, noting that he held the knicker nicker until police arrived on the scene and arrested him. "Just as we suspected, it was the suspicious-looking guy who'd been hanging around the apartment in his car." (By Ryann Connell)
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(Mainichi Japan) March 25, 2008