MISSING SOMETHING?
Hilarious moment cops take revenge on brazen fly-tippers by returning dumped sofas to their front garden
Find out how cops managed to track the offender without any CCTV
COPS had the last laugh after a man dumped two sofas in a field.
To the sound of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", police in Italy tipped the furniture back on the offender's front garden by dump truck, topping it off with a €10,000 (£8,500) fine.
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A hilarious video shared by officers in Romano di Lombardia served as a public service message against fly-tipping.
Titled "Lost Something?", the clip shows the two old couches lying in a field on the side of the road.
The video then quickly cuts to the same sofas being dumped back into the man's garden, tumbling out of a dump truck as a cop watches on.
A man is then seen manually pulling a cushion from the tipper after it fails to drop out with the rest of the sofa.
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On the original video, a message in Italian read: "Lost something? The police will find it and bring it back to your home."
It finishes with the line "always at the service of the citizen".
The resident, a 36-year-old from Rimini, claimed that he had only "put it there" and that he would come back to get it.
There was no CCTV cameras in the area, so cops spoke with neighbours and examined images from nearby roads.
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They captured the transit of a lorry along the provincial road, with a sofa loaded on the back.
The vehicle turned into the street where it ended up dumping the furniture, returning shortly without the sofa.
Fly-tippers forced to load rubbish back on truck as farmer catches them red handed
THAT WON'T FLY
Meanwhile in the UK, a single mum slammed Scrooge council workers who tried to charge her £400 for fly tipping - after she left a cardboard box next to her bin.
Lizzy Lawton placed the container next to her wheelie bin to be collected as she never received a recycling box.
But the mum was stunned when the penalty charge notice was posted through her letterbox in Stoke-on-Trent.
Samantha Arden, who is gran to Lizzy's five-year-old son, has now hit out at the council, who have since cancelled the fine.
She told : "It's not right, it is so close to Christmas and Lizzy has very little income.
"It's also my grandson's fifth birthday and she has got both to think about.
"It's a big chunk of money when she has my grandson's clothes and bills to pay for.
"My grandson has a rare gene issue and he's constantly needing things and new clothes.
"It's one box, surely they could just take it. It doesn't make any sense, it's ridiculous. The council should be ashamed of themselves.
"If they had provided her with a recycling box in the first place then it wouldn't have been there."
Samantha said Lizzy, who "just lost a lot of money" through Universal Credit changes, never received a recycling box.
She instead left the cardboard container next to her wheelie bin in the hope workers would remove it.
But when she returned home from the school run, she discovered she had been slapped with the £400 fine.
She said: "You’d think that the council could be a little charitable, but no the Scrooges expect her to find £400 for a cardboard box."
Stoke-on-Trent City Council has now waived the penalty notice for Lizzy.
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A spokesman said: "We have reviewed the evidence around this, and as a gesture of goodwill, we will withdraw the penalty notice on this occasion.
"We must stress however that there are dedicated collection points for residents to leave their recycling waste."
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