A hapless thief in Rio de Janiero tried to rob a woman last Saturday night and got a whole lot more than he bargained for. It turned out that the woman he’d tried to rob was UFC straw weight Polyana Viana.

Apparently Polyana was waiting for an Uber outside of her apartment block in the West Zone of Rio when a man approached her.

Polyana said that he must have been sneaky because when she noticed him he was already pretty close to her.

Speaking of the incident Viana said:

“When he saw I saw him, he sat next to me, he asked me the time, I said it, and I saw he wasn’t going to leave. So I already moved to put my cell phone in my waist. And then he said, ‘Give me the phone. Don’t try to react, because I’m armed.’ Then he put his hand over (a gun), but I realised it was too soft.

“He was really close to me. So I thought, ‘If it’s a gun, he won’t have time to draw it.’ So I stood up. I threw two punches and a kick. He fell, then I caught him in a rear naked choke. Then I sat him down in the same place we were before and said, ‘Now we’ll wait for the police.’”

It turns out that the gun the robber threatened Viana with was just cardboard roughly cut into the shape of a gun.

While the UFC fighter had the robber in an arm lock she asked passers by to call the police.

“He told me to let him go, like ‘I just asked for the time.’ I said, ‘Asked for the time my ass,’ because he saw I was very angry,” she said.

“I said I wouldn’t let go and that I was going to call the police. He said ‘call the police, then’ because he was scared I was going to beat him up more.”

He was taken to hospital to be treated before being taken to the police station, meanwhile Viana went home and cooked herself dinner.

She said her hands hurt a bit the day after but it was no big deal.