Woman says hotel security caught her friend on video taking her boyfriend’s camera — and the friendship ended the moment the missing camera suddenly reappeared

A Reddit user said a dinner with friends at an expensive hotel turned into a police-report standoff after her boyfriend’s camera vanished from the table and hotel security allegedly caught a close friend taking it. In a post later collected by Best of Redditor Updates, the woman said she had borrowed her boyfriend’s Canon G7X camera to take photos during dinner, then realized it was missing after she went back upstairs to the hotel room. She wrote that she returned to the dining area, checked with staff, and then asked hotel security to review video. According to her post, the footage clearly showed one of her longtime college friends taking the camera when her back was turned and putting it into her purse.

The woman said she did not immediately go to police because she wanted to give the friend a chance to fix it privately. She described the accused friend as someone she had known well for years and said she had previously paid for trips and other expenses for her. But when confronted, she wrote, the friend first denied having the camera at all. After being told there was video, the friend allegedly admitted taking it but claimed she brought it to a club afterward and lost it there. The poster said the camera was worth about $1,800, that her boyfriend was pressing her to make things right, and that the friend refused to contribute even half the replacement cost.

That refusal is what pushed the story online. In the original post, the woman asked whether she would be wrong to file a police report after giving the friend three weeks to help replace the camera. Reddit users were not especially sympathetic to the delay. Many commenters argued that the real mistake was not the report itself, but the fact that she had spent so long protecting someone who had allegedly stolen from her and then left her holding the bag with her boyfriend. The woman ultimately agreed with much of that criticism, replying that she had been trying too hard to give people the benefit of the doubt and that it had become a weakness in her character.

Once she posted an update, the story moved fast. She said she texted the friend and gave her a deadline: pay the full cost of the camera or provide shipping confirmation for a replacement by the end of that week, or a police report would follow the next morning. Later that same day, she wrote that the friend responded angrily, said she was “sick” of her, and promised a tracking number by Friday. Not long after, a FedEx tracking number did appear, but according to the woman, the package had not actually been dropped off yet. She also said the friend refused to answer a direct question about whether she was returning the original camera or sending a new one.

By the next round of updates, the poster said she had become convinced the friend never truly “lost” the camera at all. She wrote that the Canon G7X was especially sought after as a social-media camera and claimed it was hard to find in stock, which made her think the friend may have intended to keep it and assume she would buy a replacement for her boyfriend herself. That theory seemed to gain traction when the tracking still showed only label creation and no scanned package. Then, a few days later, the story abruptly flipped: the original camera was returned via FedEx and given back to the boyfriend. After that, the woman said, the friend blocked her on all social platforms.

The public story ended there, without an arrest update or any sign that the friendship survived. But the final post made clear why the camera’s return did not solve the bigger issue. The woman said the friend’s behavior made it look as if she expected the boyfriend to be made whole by someone else while she walked away with the item. Instead, once the possibility of a police report became real, the missing camera suddenly found its way back. On Reddit, that detail did most of the talking.

The Reddit roundup is here, and it includes the original post plus the later updates.

What do you think — would you have gone to police immediately, or would you have given the friend one chance to return it too?