A 43-year-old homemaker has been arrested for allegedly stealing a pair of diamond-encrusted earrings worth Rs 1.46 lakh from a prominent jewellery store at the Hudco crossing, where she had gone posing as a customer.

The alleged theft happened on January 31 but was detected only two weeks later while the stocks were being reviewed, officials at the store have told the police.

“We started scanning the store CCTV cameras and zeroed in on a suspect. The woman was wearing a mask and had not purchased anything after seeing a number of designs, the store staff could recall,” a senior police officer said.

“Luckily, this store has a policy that every person who steps in has to remove the mask once and get photographed. We managed to get the photograph of the woman whom we suspected in this case.”

On prolonged examination of the staff and guards at the store, it emerged that the store officials recorded the contact numbers of those who had special requests for any particular type of jewellery, an officer said. “One of the guards recalled that this woman had left her number so that she could be contacted once the jewellery of her choice was available.”

The cops used WhatsApp to locate the suspect’s number from a list of 20-odd clients. Investigators saved mobile numbers in their phones to check if their display pictures were available on WhatsApp.

The display picture of one WhatsApp account matched with the suspect’s photograph, an officer said.

By analysing the details of the address registered against the contact number, the police zeroed in on the 43-year-old homemaker. She was arrested from her flat in a residential complex in Anandapur and the stolen earrings were recovered.

The accused was produced in court on Thursday and remanded in judicial custody for 14 days.