TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — An angry Uniqlo customer accused Uniqlo Taiwan of groundlessly suing him for theft after he was seen on surveillance camera footage touching a jacket where tags torn from stolen products were stashed.
The man surnamed Huang (黃) took to the online forum Dcard on Sept. 2 to share about the incident. According to him, on Aug. 18, he rode a moped to visit a Uniqlo location in Tainan, which he had never visited before, and left the store without buying anything.
On Aug. 31, he received a call from the police to inform him that he had become a suspect of a theft that occurred at the store. He made an appointment for the police to take his statement on Sept. 2, and learned that the store had reported two pieces of men’s underwear missing with their torn-off tags stuffed into a jacket’s pocket.
Huang wrote that the store had claimed to have surveillance footage of Huang touching the jacket in question on that day. However, he added that the store did not provide footage of the underwear section.
“I did check out that jacket on that day, but it was to feel its material. When you buy clothes, materials are important, after all. Moreover, I did not even touch underwear products on that day, nor did I stuff anything into the jacket’s pocket,” Huang wrote.
When Huang asked the store to provide surveillance footage for the underwear section, the store told him it could not do so due to privacy concerns and because a lawsuit was already ongoing. Huang wrote in response to comments that he believed it logical to see footage of the underwear section since it was underwear that was stolen, and “since tags were ripped off, there would be very obvious movement.”
Huang cited the police as saying he was not the only customer to touch the jacket on the day of the theft, but he became the only one reported because the place he touched the jacket was close to a pocket near the chest area. After he wrote an email to Uniqlo Taiwan’s head office and told its staff his demands to see relevant surveillance footage, he was told it would be provided to the police, but it would take time.
He claimed that he did not hear back from the retailer until a week after the email exchange, when it informed him the footage had been provided to the police while the torn-off underwear tags were preserved as evidence.
On Wednesday (Dec. 14), Huang returned to Dcard with another update after receiving a non-prosecution decision document from the prosecutors’ office, which read, “The plaintiff’s representative’s claim that the defendant’s theft of two underwear items is merely based on surveillance camera footage that shows the defendant lingering for 27 seconds in an aisle of the underwear section and 10 seconds before the jacket containing the underwear’s tags.”
The prosecutor added, “According to the investigation, as the underwear section is not covered by the surveillance camera footage, whether the defendant stole the two pieces of underwear cannot be judged directly from the footage.”
Huang wrote he only learned from the document that the underwear section was in fact not shown in the surveillance footage. “Does this mean that in the future, when people shop at Uniqlo, they must all record videos to protect themselves or not touch any product?”
He demanded that the retailer issue an official apology for accusing him of something he did not do and requiring him to expend a great amount of time, money, and effort. He questioned the company’s handling of the incident, whether it was flawed “or even too sloppy,” and whether staff members involved even reviewed the surveillance footage fully before accusing him.
“Why, without touching any underwear, must I hire a lawyer and take time off work for something I did not do, while you, Uniqlo, get to operate as usual? Who is responsible for my lost money and time, when it was your evidence that had issues?” he added.
On Thursday (Dec. 15), Huang posted a screenshot of an email he received from the company, which read, “Regarding the inconvenience the process caused you, we apologize and thank you for your full cooperation … In terms of providing evidence, we cooperated with prosecutors and the police’s investigation and provided information during the investigation.”
Huang wrote, “There is only a description in text, and no mention of any intention to apologize to me personally.”
Huang’s story has garnered wide attention online, and netizens have flooded Uniqlo Taiwan’s social media pages demanding a proper response and mocking the company for suing its customers just for touching its displayed product. At the time of publishing, Uniqlo Taiwan has not issued any public statements.
