Our cleaner stole from us

Liam McPoyle

Hi folks, looking for some input.

Basically we have had a cleaner for the last few month's. She had initially started with us through a company but she parted ways with them and offered to stay working with us and we would just pay here directly.

We were happy with her, her work and had no reason to not trust her.

I arrived home from work Friday last to find her key on the floor inside the door of our house.

She had only done half of what she normally did so I assumed that she had to leave at short notice and didn't want to continue working for us, no issue there.

My wife text her that evening to ask if everything was OK but got no response.

The next day I was moving stuff in our spare room and came across the lens cap from my camera on the floor. I didn't think much of it until I went to the wardrobe to put it back on the camera only to discover the camera was not where I thought I had left it.

I turned the room upside down in case I'd put it somewhere else and forgot but it didn't appear.

Both my wife and I searched the whole house again on Sunday and couldn't find it. My wife then checked her jewellery box and discovered a Tiffany bracelet missing as well as some cosmetics and bizarrely, a bottle of men's deodorant.

I text the cleaner yesterday playing dumb and asking had she moved the camera as I'd found the lens cap on the ground and that I wanted to know if she put it away somewhere.

I got no response.

Aside from my wife and I, literally nobody else has been upstairs in our house for the last month or more so the logic states that the cleaner has stolen the camera and the other bits.

I text her again a little while ago asking her to return the items and that we would forget all about it once we get our property back. I've told her that unless we get them back within 24 hours we will have no option but to contact the guards.

My question is, assuming she does not respond and we do not get our things back, what realistically can happen?

We will report it to the guards but would that actually do any good?

We can prove that she was in our house up until the time she stopped working with the company but after that, we don't have proof. We paid her in cash so have no records of bank details to prove she was working for us. My wife does have text messages from her though, discussing what was do be done over the last few weeks.

We are both pretty pissed off over the camera as it had a lot of photos on it, some of which havnt been backed up so if we don't get it back they are gone forever.

Thoughts welcome.

nuac

Mod
You need legal advice, which cannot be given on this forum, sorry
Thread closed