Driver sleeps in vehicle for a month to catch serial car scratcher

A man who had had his car scratched over 20 times in the last six months finally managed to catch the perpetrator in the act after sleeping in the vehicle for a month.

Finding your car scratched is unpleasant, but definitely not uncommon, which is why Kot Matroskin, a driver from Minsk, Belarus, didn’t pay much attention when it first happened to him, about six months ago. But after noticing subsequent scratches on the fender of his Volkswagen Polo in a relatively short period of time, he started looking for clues about who might want to scratch his car and why. He was soon able to discover that the scratching occurred only when he parked his car near a pedestrian walkway at the entrance of a park and seemed to be done with the same object, as the scratches all looked very similar.

Determined to get some answers, the man left a note in the window of his car asking the person who had made a habit of scratching his car why they were doing it. He even posted his email address so the perpetrator could answer his question even if they feared a face-to-face confrontation. That didn’t work out as he had planned as he got no messages. He then installed a camera on the dashboard of his car hoping to catch the person in the act but apart from some pedestrian passing suspiciously close to his car, the footage didn’t reveal anything useful. Matroskin realised that it was impossible to tell if someone was scratching the car as they passed by from the video, so he decided that he only had two options – find another place to park or catch this criminal himself.

So for the last month, he got up in the middle of the night and went to sleep in his car, hoping to catch the perpetrator red-handed. After analysing his daily schedule, he estimated that the scratching generally occurred between 4:00 to 6:00am, so he would set his alarm clock to 4:00am every night, put on thick clothes, grab a sleeping bag and spend three hours in the backseat of his car.

On the morning of November 27, at 5:40 am, he heard someone pass by the car, followed by the characteristic long scraping sound of metal on metal. He quickly got out to confront his nemesis, but instead of a man that he had expected to see, he came face to face with a little old lady with white hair sticking out from under a funny hat. He filmed the whole confrontation with his phone, adding that the woman only accepted responsibility for the scratches she left that morning, offering to pay him for the damage if he let her go without calling the police.

He eventually called the police and pressed charges against the woman, hoping to receive both compensation for both material and moral damages, according to odditycentral.com.

“I just hope that after doing the authorities’ job of apprehending the offender, they can do theirs by properly punishing her for her crime,” Matroskin said.