Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast
This TikTok Star is going to jail - The Marlena Velez story
30 Jan 2025
TikTok star Marlena Velez was caught allegedly shoplifting at a Target in Florida.
Full Episode
So this TikTok mommy vlogger might just be looking at a felony. Now her name's Marlena. 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 vlogs. 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 scanning the items 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 . 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 Marlena is gonna 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 noticed. She got 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.
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