Online comments on a video of a woman seen taking pot plants from outside a residential home helped locate the culprit.

CCTV footage of the theft was uploaded on You Tube by the victim’s son, Jurgen Scicluna, earlier this month.

In the footage, a woman is seen eyeing a residential home for several minutes before picking up three large pot plants from the front porch and loading them into her Skoda Fabia.

The video garnered more than 38,000 views and went viral on social media with many expressing outrage and others commenting on the “comical” method employed by the thief.

Mr Scicluna told Times of Malta he had received a number of comments from social media users that helped him locate the suspect himself.

“I was contacted by different people who had information on this woman. I eventually managed to track her down thanks to their help,” the Facebook sleuth said.

Mr Scicluna said he had tried to confront the woman himself after he tracked down her car to a residential part of Ħamrun.

His attempts proved fruitless because the alleged thief would not emerge from her home.

Mr Scicluna later approached the police with the information only to be told they already knew who she was and where she lived.

Asked why they had not spoken to the woman, the police said she had not responded to them.

“So if you steal something you can just avoid the police by not answering their calls? I don’t think that’s right,” Mr Scicluna said, adding that the police had been critical of him because he decided to upload the footage in the first place.

“They said I had set them back because now she was in hiding. This is ridiculous,” he said.

Mr Scicluna insisted that his primary concern was not the retrieval of the stolen plants but to put an end to a string of similar occurrences in the area.

“My neighbours started speaking up about similar thefts.

“It’s not much money but it’s absurd,” he said.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.