Some troubling police reports and Google reviews of a local Atlanta dive bar lend weight to a recent report detailing how two men were each robbed of nearly $30,000 on two different nights at the establishment.
Several people who visited the Five Paces Inn on Irby Avenue within the last year posted Google Reviews sharing that their phones and wallets were stolen at the bar. Some people even said that their bank accounts were emptied after their phones were stolen, revealing a bizarre and unsettling pattern of alleged thefts and grand larcenies.
Police records obtained by Atlanta Black Star also show nearly 60 reported incidents at Five Paces Inn over the past year, many of them larcenies and stolen property reports. Some of those reports even cite credit card fraud or wire fraud incidents in which more than $10,000 was stolen.
NBC News interviewed two victims who said they went to the Buckhead bar and later discovered they were missing tens of thousands of dollars from their bank accounts.
Charlie Zeanah, 27, told the outlet he was robbed last week. Micah Brown, 34, was robbed last year.
According to Zeanah’s account, he said he visited the bar on Saturday, Feb. 3. and started a conversation with a woman he didn’t know. The next thing he knew, he woke up in the back seat of a moving car, unable to speak. He said he has a vague memory of two men and a woman in the car with him.
Sometime after the car stopped in an apartment complex, a man pinned Zeanah down in the parking lot and took his wallet, jewelry, and cellphone. He remembers fleeing and going in and out of gas stations, asking for someone to call him an Uber.
It wasn’t until around 6 a.m. that morning that someone finally gave Zeanah a ride home.
Once he got home, he learned that around $25,000 had been taken out of his checking accounts. That money had been transferred using Zelle, Venmo, CashApp, or other investment accounts.
Zeanah also said the thieves changed the password on his iCloud account, which effectively locked him out. He believes someone might have used his unconscious face to gain access to his phone or somehow coaxed him to share his password, but he’s still not sure what happened.
In Brown’s case, the 34-year-old reported that he visited the same bar as Zeanah in June 2023. On the night he visited, he lost his phone. A friend found it in the bar’s bathroom, which Brown never used all night.
Two days later, he started receiving a flurry of email notifications saying money had also been transferred out of his accounts. Brown said he lost roughly $34,000.
Brown also believes the thieves either got ahold of his passcode or used facial recognition technology somehow to gain access to his phone.
Zeanah filed a report online with the police. Brown didn’t but worked to get his money back from banks instead.
On Instagram, Brown commented that he still frequents the bar and isn’t worried about the money he lost. He asserted that Five Paces Inn “did nothing” to him and that a “particular group” of people were behind the thefts.
Dozens of online reviews show that there were even more victims who said their belongings were also stolen during their visits to the Five Paces Inn.
“My boyfriend and my friend both got their phones stolen here (on different nights),” one reviewer wrote three months ago. “In my boyfriend’s case, they got into his Apple Pay and Apple ID and changed all of his passwords and took around $10K in total. Also they spent $2k on a delta airlines gift card.”
“BEWARE. Professional thieves drugged and robbed a close friend of mine. They roofied him, then stole his phone and unloaded his bank account. Management let’s it happen. Avoid at all costs.” one review from five months ago reads.
“My girlfriend’s phone was pickpocketed from her purse within 5 minutes of arriving at this bar last week,” another patron wrote in a review a year ago. “Bouncer said they’d ‘review the videotapes.’ Nothing came of it, Atlanta PD was no help either.”
Police records show that there were two reports of wire fraud involving more than $10,000 in November and December. Atlanta Police spokesperson Officer John Predmore told Atlanta Black Star the department does not have any records of Zeanah and Brown contacting police.
“We would encourage anyone who was the victim of a crime to call police and report it,” Predmore said in an email.
