Rich people problems, or at least, people who can afford $150 glasses problem.

That guy needs to work on his confidence grift.
The way it should work is he has the broken glasses and make it seem like the other person had broken them by accident
Then you appeal to their sense of guilt and make them give you cash to fix them.

Exactly. A guy on 42nd street pulled this same scam on me a few years ago. The sidewalk was totally empty, but somehow he still walked straight toward me, swung his arm so that his hand perfectly tapped mine, and the glasses fell out. The crack in the lens was one so enormous that it only could have come from hitting it with a hammer.

These guys don't actually need glasses (if they did, why carry them in hand?), so they don't get that your average pair of specs is surprisingly durable. They don't shatter simply from hitting the ground, and a small child would have to deliberately stomp on them to break anything but the arm.

Oh! And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe a pair of lenses alone would cost more than just $150 to replace, let alone the whole schmear. Without insurance, my lenses run upwards of $200. But scammers usually ask for between $80 and $160, because they're decent round numbers, not too generic nor too specific.

In this case, the scam artist must think he can turn this into some kind of long-con and blackmail the guy by smearing him. But the picture is unrecognizable ("Please help me find this man? His head is shaped like a lop-sided t-bone steak."), and the story is laughably bogus. Better luck next time.

Writer's not American.  Note the date.

Colombo! You are on to something here!

The FBI called.  They want my skillz.

Does it say it was the man, or his kid? Looks like it reads, "His kid...". 

A simple case of lens envy.

No they were prescription lenses so it was p-lens envy.

Touche

Richard Belzer?