Clara Nery, a reporter with Brazilian broadcaster Band Rio, was moments away from going live on the streets of Rio de Janeiro when a man on a motorcycle attempted to snatch her phone—right as the camera was rolling.
“In the video, you can see the moment he puts his hand on my phone and takes it from me. Luckily, I was holding on tightly,” Nery recalled, according to Band Rio.
The would-be thief fled the scene, but Nery managed to recover her phone shortly afterward and was unharmed during the incident.
“It was a real scare to go live,” she wrote in a follow-up post on Instagram. “But the important thing is that everything turned out okay!”
Nery went on to express gratitude to those who reached out in the aftermath. “Thanks for the messages and support from my coworkers, the Military Police, and the Civil Police,” she wrote. She also urged the public to help identify the suspect: “Let’s share his face—he wants to be known.”
According to The Nightly, phone thefts in Rio de Janeiro jumped 27 percent this June compared to the same month in 2024, citing data from the Rio de Janeiro Public Security Institute.
In total, over 2,300 phones were reported stolen in June 2025—up from 1,808 the year before.
