Photo: Contributed

"As soon as they came in the store, I knew they were trouble."

A downtown Vernon business owner is short $5,400 after two strangers robbed her inside her own store.  

After arriving at her business, Casa Bella Bedding Boutique, shortly after 9 a.m., two people walked in and pretended to be interested in making a purchase.

"There was a couple that was standing across the street, and as soon as I opened, they came in right behind me and said, 'I'm looking for a gift for my mother,'" said Diana Vona.

The man and woman, who she described as "sketchy individuals" then separated, with the man asking Vona for her assistance.

She followed the man upstairs, leaving the woman unattended below.

Normally, when she gets to work, Vona puts her purse in a drawer behind the till, but on Monday she was caught off guard and didn't get a chance to put it away, she said. She ended up leaving it on the floor.

When she and the man returned to the front of the store, the woman was suddenly adamant about leaving and said they would come back later.

"She must have gotten in my wallet," Diana said. "I didn't know what had happened until I got a call from my bank saying, 'are you at work?' and I said 'yes.'"

The bank quickly informed her someone was tapping her credit cards all around town.

"I looked in my purse, and they had stolen my wallet with $5,400 and all my ID with all my credit cards," she said.  

This comes as downtown business owners and Vernon residents are demanding change when it comes to the city's street-entrenched population.

"We are trying to stay here and be in business, and we're always getting robbed. This is ridiculous," Vona said. "To say that we don't have a problem is crazy."

Vona had to close her store Monday so that she could cancel all her credit cards and contact the RCMP.

She described the couple as in their forties. The man was about six feet tall with a tattoo on his calf, the woman was about 5-foot-8 with light brown hair and acne scars.