A woman was today ordered to pay damage costs after CCTV footage of her keying a car went viral.
Hazel Innes, 44, scored the paintwork of three vehicles while out walking her dog in Buckie in January.
She was caught in the act by car owner Shona Coull who had set up a CCTV camera outside her home.
Ms Coull posted a 23 second clip of her white BMW X3 being vandalised on social media in the hope that someone would recognise the culprit.
More than half a million people viewed the footage online after it was uploaded.
And police eventually caught up with Innes who later admitted the vandalism offence in court.
Innes also admitted two other acts of vandalism on cars at Elgin Sheriff Court.
Fiscal depute Alison Wylie told the court £2, 845 of damage had been caused to the three vehicles.
She said: “The cars had been parked reasonably close to each other.
“On the date in question, the cars had been left and everything seemed fine.
“At some point on the January 24, it was discovered that other vehicles were damaged elsewhere.
“Word on that got back to witnesses in this particular area and some people went out and started looking at their cars and saw scratches along their vehicles.
“One of the witnesses has a CCTV system.”
The court heard that the footage showed Innes strolling down the pavement on Buckie’s Seaview Road with a pug on a lead just after 6pm on January 22.
And after stopping to check if the coast was clear, she took a sharp object out of her pocket running it down the entire length of Ms Coull’s car.
She also did the same to two other cars, a Nissan Qashqai and a Honda CR-V, in the town’s James Street during the same Friday night crime spree.
All three cars were parked just a matter of minutes around the corner from Innes’s given home address.
When police caught up with her, she admitted being in the area at the time but denied the offence.
Defence lawyer David Adam said: “She certainly admits now that she must have done it.
“She can give no explanation for why she did it.
“She bears no grudges to any of the people, the owner of the cars.”
Yesterday Sheriff Olga Pasportnikov deferred sentence on Innes to be of good behaviour until August and told her that she would have to pay back all damage costs by her next court appearance.
Ms Coull said afterwards: “I’m happy if I get my money back.
“It’s normally really quiet here – we don’t normally have any trouble.
“There had been vandalism in the area last year so that’s why we decided to put up the CCTV.
“But the police said to me that in hindsight it was really a good job that I had put the cameras up – otherwise we would never have found out who did it.”
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