A single valet ticket was enough to drive off with a $90,000 BMW X5 in downtown Savannah, and investigators say the same con artist had already worked the same trick at another hotel weeks earlier. The Savannah Police Department says the theft happened at the Hyatt Regency on West Bay Street early on August 14, when a man claiming to be a professional basketball player handed valet staff a ticket for the gray 2026 BMW X5, a dealership loaner valued at roughly $90,000.

How the scheme worked

According to TMZ’s review of the police report, the suspect arrived at the Hyatt in a white 2025 Audi A5 he had been driving and told staff he had “several cars parked there” while he retrieved belongings. He then produced the ticket for the BMW and drove off with it around 12:30 a.m. The Audi turned out to be stolen itself and was later found abandoned, unlocked, in the hotel’s parking garage.

A pattern across Savannah hotels

Police believe the same man pulled off an earlier theft on August 5 and 6 at the Fairfield Inn on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, where he used a stolen guest’s valet retrieval code to drive away with her Toyota C-HR, WTOC reported. Investigators say that pattern links thefts at two separate downtown hotel valet stands to one suspect working the same basic con: show up with a plausible story and a ticket, then walk out with someone else’s car.

• $90,000 — value of the stolen 2026 BMW X5
• Two hotels targeted so far: the Fairfield Inn and the Hyatt Regency, both in downtown Savannah
• Three vehicles tied to the suspect’s run, including a Toyota C-HR, an Audi A5 and the BMW

Where the case stands

Savannah Police released surveillance images of the suspect on September 3 and are asking the public for help identifying him. The BMW was eventually tracked to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, according to WSB-TV. Hyatt Regency Savannah told reporters it is “aware of this incident and took immediate action to care for the impacted guest,” though no arrests had been announced as of publication.

The case is a reminder that a valet stand runs almost entirely on trust. A ticket number and a confident story are often the only checks standing between a guest’s car and the person walking away with the keys, and hotel operators in tourist-heavy downtown Savannah are now facing questions about whether their valet verification steps need to change.