As any cop will tell you, most criminals don’t become criminals because they’re geniuses. Take the would-be book thief who strolled into Michael Baulderstone‘s comic book store in Adelaide, Australia last Saturday. Baulderstone and his partner, Peter Spandrio, had invited customers to dress as their favorite superheroes and come on over to celebrate International Free Comic Day with them. Baulderstone dressed as Spider-Man, and Spandrio as the Flash. And, as a report from the Daily Mail details, when one customer took the idea of Free Comic Day a little too literally and tried to “swipe an X-Men omnibus worth £97” — yep, you guess it. Spidey caught him.

“I was actually desperate to get the mask off and the gloves as it was restricting my movements but in the end it was too late and I had to leave the costume on,” Baulderstone says. “Everyone in the store thought it was a play, that it was street theatre of some sort.  It wasn’t until I started shouting ‘Call the police’ that people started to realize what was really happening.”

According to the report, the police arrived to find the culprit in the hands of Spider-Man, with several Jedi knights blocking the door. “The Flash was there at some point too,” says Baulderstone.

Store surveillance footage below.