A store owner in Manitoba, Canada, caught a thief who’d broken into his shop to steal watches with a simple strategy: he friended him on Facebook.

Stefan Tergesen, the owner of H.P. Tergesen & Sons, said the thief broke a window in his shop early Friday morning and stole several watches from a display case. However, instead of letting the authorities conduct the investigation by themselves, Tergesen decided to do a little Internet sleuthing of his own.

“I put the little bit of footage onto our Facebook page and our Instagram page, and asked our customers and friends if they could share it around and see if we could identify who this person was,” Tergesen said.

Soon, Tergesen had the name of his suspected thief. He sent him a friend request on Facebook, and the thief, feeling guilty, promised to give himself up to the cops.

“I wish I could have been there to see his face when he got the friend request from me,” Tergesen said. “It wasn’t much… later that he accepted the friend request and came to the response that he would be turning himself in.”

While Facebook can be a powerful tool for tracking anyone down, authorities don’t recommend crime victims conduct this kind of investigation themselves. It may have been effective in this case, but it’s usually best to let law enforcement handle ithe matter.