A man in Savannah, Georgia, walked up to a hotel valet, said he played pro basketball, and drove off with someone else’s $90,000 BMW. Now police want to know who he is.
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It happened just after midnight on August 14 at the Hyatt Regency. The man handed over a valet ticket for a gray 2026 BMW X5, got behind the wheel, and left. Staff at the hotel say he’d told them he was a professional basketball player with several cars parked there. None of that was true the BMW belonged to a local dealership, on loan to a guest staying at the hotel.
Security footage puts him in the lobby earlier that night, going through a white Audi before he ever asked for the BMW. He grabbed some items from it, then walked up and handed over the ticket for the BMW instead.
Investigators later tracked the stolen BMW to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. As for the Audi, it turned out to be stolen too, though it showed up unlocked in the hotel’s parking garage the next morning with no visible damage.
A Second Theft With the Same Setup
This isn’t the only valet theft police are looking at. A week earlier, on August 6, a guest at a nearby Fairfield Inn had her 2019 Toyota C-HR taken straight off the valet stand. Investigators think the same person may be behind both.
Savannah Police put out four surveillance photos on social media, hoping someone recognizes the man. So far, there’s no name, no team, and no confirmation of who he actually claimed to be just a guy who talked his way into a $90,000 car and disappeared.
The case surfaced days after a separate athlete-impersonation story made headlines. Federal prosecutors accused a man named Daejon Love of posing as a San Francisco 49ers player to scam multiple women he’d met on dating apps, allegedly using the fake identity to push phony investments. Love and an alleged accomplice were arrested at an airport in Boise, Idaho, and prosecutors are now pushing to keep him detained, citing strong evidence and flight risk.
Whether the two cases are connected isn’t clear, but both point to the same pattern: someone claiming a professional athlete’s identity to get access, and access, in the Savannah case, ending with a car nobody can currently find its driver for.