We all love a good heist movie, but it's even more thrilling to find out a thief has pulled off a daring crime in real life. Bonus points if the deed was done by someone we know. We asked people from all over the world to tell us about the most cunning, clever, and courageous criminals they've ever tangled with, and the crimes they got away with--or in some cases, didn't.
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35. Do they even have Costco in Israel?
A friend of my brother moved to Israel where for a period of time it was acceptable to drive with an American driver's license. He was pulled over for speeding, and when asked for his license, gave the officer his Costco membership card instead. The exchange apparently went something like this:
Officer: "Costco? What is Costco?"
Friend: "It's the state I'm from."
Officer: "That sounds made up."
Friend: "There are lots of states you probably haven't heard of. Have you heard of Arkansas? How about Idaho?"
Officer: "I guess not."
Friend: "Well, I'm from the small state of Costco."
The officer didn't have a response and wound up writing the ticket to someone with a Costco driver's license. My brother's friend framed the ticket and still has it hanging on his wall.
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34. Back to the chalkboard.
My primary school got robbed of all their new computers when I was a kid. They were so proud of their new computer lab and made a big celebration of it (this was in the dial-up days) when IT was about to boom into the enormous industry it has become.
The guys managed to open a window enough to get a stick through and wave it around in front of the motion sensors until they set the alarms off. Of course, being back to base alarms the police would be notified straight away and the thieves would close the window and hide.
So when the cops arrived there would be no sign of forced entry and nothing was missing. So it looked like a faulty alarm.
They continued this cycle until the cops got complacent and stopped responding. Then the thieves were free to empty the place out and no one found out until the computer lab teacher unlocked the door the next morning.
I never found out if they got busted in the end or not but I like to think they didn't.
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33. What is that in kilometers?
I’m British and my friend’s Dad was pulled over in America doing over 100mph in a rental car. The cop said, “I know you don’t have speed limits in Europe, but here in the US you can’t do more than 65mph here.” After the warning he sent him on his way. Our speed limit in the UK is 70mph. I think he probably just couldn’t be bothered to do the paperwork involved in ticketing a foreigner.
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32. Everyone knows you don't bring a real gun to an armed robbery.
Guy I went to high school with kept selling this gold necklace under a fake ID to jewelry stores. When he had cash in his hand from the sale, he'd flash a real looking airsoft gun and demand the necklace back. Worked about twice until the store owners he'd hit informed other pawn shop owners what the deal was if someone tried selling this one particular necklace. The third shop owner went in the back to "reference an appraisal book" and just called the cops.
Funny part was he got like a year for the robberies, but using the fake gun added 5 years to the sentence.
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31. Your name sounds familiar...
There was a guy with over 50 speeding charges, with the name “Prawo Jazdy.” He was in a different car, with a different disguise every single time. Eventually, after the government set up a special task force to take down this guy, they realized that “Prawo Jazdy” just means “drivers license” in Polish.
After further investigation, it was discovered that it was a bunch of different people, the police just wrote down their name as “Prawo Jazdy” every time someone with a Polish drivers license was caught speeding.
Image by Christine Sponchia from Pixabay
30. These guys are masterminds in the making.
There's a small tourist town where I grew up that is divided in half by a big river. The only way between the two sides is over a long bridge, unless you go all the way around another mountain pass.
These guys called in, like, 2-3 bomb threats to a posh hotel on one side of the bridge. I think they even left some dummy packages. All the police went across the bridge to do crowd control, etc. The guys then called in a bomb threat on the bridge and started robbing stuff on one side while the cops were stuck on the other side. The police couldn't be positive the bomb threat was real or not and hesitated crossing the bridge long enough to give the thieves a head start.
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29. Seems like a lot of work for just a bike.
I knew this guy back in the early 80's, let's call him Jim. He really wanted this high powered motorbike but he knew he couldn't ever afford it, so what he did was to take a drive to London and scouted about for a few days until he found that particular model parked outside a house.
He goes back that night with a slidehammer, pulls the lock, and steals the bike. He gets it home, puts it in his garage and completely strips it so that the only thing left is the frame and the bottom half of the engine - which he drags into the weeds at the bottom of his garden, then he pours fuel over it and burns it a bit. A few weeks pass and weeds have started growing over it. It's at that point he calls the cops and reports that someone had dumped a bike frame in his garden. The cops show up and he explains that he'd just got back from being away and found it.
The cops take the frame and note down his name and address. A few days later, the cops call him and say that the bike had been stolen from London a month or so ago, and that the insurance company had classed the bike as a write off, and had told the cops to dispose of it.
What's interesting is that because the frame was found in his garden and the insurance company didn't want it, the cops were duty bound to ask him if he wanted to keep it, or if they should throw it out. So he tells them that he'd always wanted to build a bike...
He gets the fame back from them, repaints it, then puts it all back together and re-registers it as stolen and recovered.
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28. You always keep the receipt.
I was working in a home improvement store when I was younger. This guy came in, went to the snow blowers, took one and went to the return desk. Said he wanted to return it but had no receipt. They told him you need a receipt so he says, "Ok, I’ll be back." Then he wheels it off through the front door. He did this a few times apparently. A few other employees even helped him load it “back” into his car.
27. When in doubt, throw in the towel.
I worked at Sears about 20 years ago. A guy came up the escalator empty-handed, walked into the first aisle, and came out carrying a very expensive linen set. He said he wanted to return it, I said he needed a receipt and when he asked why, I explained: "Well sometimes we have issues with people coming up here, taking stuff off the shelves and trying to return it."
He got a bit squirrely, looked around kinda panicked and left with it. On the way to the door, security started following him so he threw it at them and sprinted out the door.
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26. They call it a French exit.
A French thief in Paris found a building, broke in, and transformed the the exit door to look like it led into an extra apartment. He put the apartment number, fake lock, welcome rug, etc.
The he put an iPhone for sale. The person came to buy it, he opened the door in a shower robe, took the cash and said, "Give me one second, I'm just gonna get the phone... and POOF!
He disappeared down the exit stairs.
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25. She was only enforcing the rules.
I was an RA in college. My university owned all the houses adjacent to campus. These were just like dorms, with RAs and the same rules which included a very strict no alcohol policy. It was a privilege to live in the houses, and priority was given to upperclassmen who were more likely to bend that rule because they were of age and it was harder to police off campus in houses.
There was a student who went around knocking on doors saying something like “I’m an RA and the housing director sent me for health and wellness checks.” She’d find their booze, take it, and follow up with how she’s doing them a favor by just giving them a warning. She wasn’t actually an RA and was just keeping the booze for herself.
The only reason she got found out was because she did it to an actual RA. The RA was male (they kept men and women housing separate) and just assumed he didn’t know her because of that. It was only later he questioned why they had a female doing wellness checks on male housing. They did an investigation and asked other residents. Incidents dated back previous 2 years. Never found out who it was.
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24. Gotta have that new iPhone.
I'm a cop and a guy on my patrol used a sledgehammer to smash his way through a wall at a Best Buy and steal a bunch of phones and cameras. He was smart enough to wear gloves and a face mask and not touch anything he didn't have to. Alarms didn't go off until he exited out the back door, which the alarm company gets after a minute or two and takes them another 3 or 4 minutes to call in to us, giving him a good 5 minute head start so he was probably a few miles away before we got dispatched to it. He clearly scoped out the area before doing his deed too. Smart dude.
Pixabay
23. He stole his own getaway car.
My friend Dave was working at a Mercedes dealership. He was sitting at his desk when this well dressed gentleman comes in and asks if he could test drive a specific car that was parked out front. It was also a busy day. Usually they are allowed to let people test drive by themselves after they have taken some form of a deposit or some form of official ID.
So Dave gives out the keys, the guy goes on his test drive and comes back a reasonable amount of time later. He walks in and hands off the key, gets his deposit and ID back. This was about closing time, even possibly on a Friday. Everything is in order.
Fast forward to the next business day. Dave's boss walks in and realizes that one of the Mercedes out front is gone. Dave has to explain that the car was returned and that they have the key and everything. Turns out the criminal didn't test drive, he drove somewhere to create a replica of the key and gave that replica back to the desk. He kept the real key, and took the car after the dealership closed for the night.
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22. That's one way to get out of debt.
This story comes a friend of mine who's an insurance and debt collector. There was this guy who was already in heaps of debt. Like more than a lifetimes worth of debt. He proceeded to file several police reports for identity theft up to the point that he got protected from financial checkups. It was a temporary measure that were given to repeated identity theft victims. At the same time he had reported fake income to the IRS for the last couple of years to between 40 to 60 millions depending on the year.
So when he applied for credit cards and loans, they were unable to check his financial credit due to the identity theft protection, but they checked his tax returns which showed he had a massive income. He got his loans and credit cards, emptied them out and left the country.
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21. The Houdini of the thief world.
There was an incident in Fargo, North Dakota, where a guy wanted to steal electronics equipment. The store had plenty of alarms on it and generally cutting an alarm triggers an alarm so instead he cut ALL the alarms. This was before cellphones were really widespread and alarms were usually just connected to the phone line. He found an access point to one of the phone companies big trunk lines . Massive thick copper cables with tens of thousands of lines running through them. He cut through the whole thing with a circular saw, knocked out phone service to most of the town and robbed an audio store during the ensuing chaos.
There were no leads until a tip came in from another town where he'd pulled something similar. They hadn't been able to pin that to him but had strong suspicions and he'd relocated to Fargo. So the cops pay him a visit. He refused to let them in because they didn't have a warrant so the cops left to get one without leaving anyone to watch him and he split. When they came back they found the saw coated in copper dust and a lot of the stolen stuff.
He was in the wind for a while but even after he got caught he had another card to play. While being transported between prisons he used a key he'd made to unlock his shackles and climbed out the roof vent of the bus.
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20. Didn't his mother teach him not to brag?
Someone noticed that the bank vault had put it's safety deposit box in in a way that there was a space at the 90-degree point where wall meets wall. He times it on a Friday and climbed and hid in that spot. He had actually rented out a box which he put in a clock with a loud alarm set to see if there are sound sensors in the vault. Then, when he saw his chance, he climbed in.
Employees closed the vault with him inside. He has the whole weekend and gets to knocking the locks out with a hammer one at a time and stole everything.
He then replaced the locks back to look like they are not tampered with and jumped back into the spot.
Monday morning the vault is open. Turns out bank was doing renovations. He picked that day. Throws on a workers jacket and literally walks out the bank.
Employees did not notice till the first person who came to open his safety deposit box. The lock fell in.
They could not identify who did it and he would have got away with it save his big mouth. Turns out he was a hairdresser and kept telling his customers how he stole from the bank and he was a genius and they will never catch him.
Someone snitched and he was picked up. They could not value what he stole as safety box contents are unknown.
Because of this dude, all banks now fill the space where the two safety cabinets meet with concrete.
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19. Honey, we're upgrading to a plasma screen.
I heard about one person that pulled a shoplifting scam on a large, popular and well-known U.S. retail store. They walked in with some cheap nylon product to get one of those "I walked in with this" stickers they used to put on returning merchandise. The sticker easily peeled off the product undamaged. They walked to the electronics department, grabbed an expensive box off the shelf and went to Customer Service. They placed the sticker on the big box and asked if they could return the item without a receipt. "Unfortunately, no. Not without the original receipt." Dang it, the person said, and went to leave. Customer service even gave the door man the thumbs up having just interacted with the customer. This took place before widespread inventory controls and cameras absolutely everywhere.
18. Anything to avoid the winter.
I worked at a jail. After getting off work, I watched an ex inmate who was homeless being released. He walked over to a patrol car, looked me in the eye, and then elbowed the window in. He was walked back to the entrance and re-booked in. It was middle of January. He didn't want to get too cold.
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17. Nerves of steel.
I used to run bars at a number of venues around the England, one of which was Chester Racecourse. Usually, we'd just have to keep an eye out for moochers trying to nick drinks or sneak in without paying, and with it being so close to Liverpool there was a fair amount of security on site. You could recognize them on the spot, as they'd be suited, booted, with a hi-viz waistcoat on and usually carrying a radio.
Now there were a dozen or so bars dotted around the course, and you can imagine the amount of money that was taken from a hundred thousand or so punters drinking steadily from eleven until eight or nine in the evening. So every hour or so, the security would go round the bars in turn and take all the high-denomination notes from each till and stick them in the safe in the main building.
So I'm stood there one day, pulling pints and doing the barman thing, the security blokes have been round a few times and it's getting steadily busier. Then one bloke shows up on his own, hi-viz on and radio in his hand. He does the till, leaving the usual receipt so we can balance up at the end of the meeting. I thought he was a bit early, but I was too busy to ask him about it. Then ten minutes or so later, two more blokes show up, dressed the same. "Oh, your mate's just been here," I said. "No need to touch that just yet."
"What mate?" they asked. "We're the only two doing this duty today." Cue a rapid-fire and increasingly panicked exchange over the radio. The guy who'd done the till before used to work there apparently, so he knew the drill and he'd been watching the guards and knew just when to time it and what order they were going round the bars in. Apparently he got round nine or ten before he decided not to push his luck any further and walked away with about eighty grand we heard later. Just took off the hi-viz, dumped that and the radio and he's just one more guy in a suit in a crowd of thousands.
They were a bit stricter on the procedure after that.
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16. Sleepwalking her way into prison.
Some fella broke into a jewelry store a couple of decades ago. You’d think he’d go for the vault but instead he stole the chandelier overlooking the show room. Turns out the thing is priceless. Funny thing is we found the owner’s daughter in a state of undress in the store in the morning. She claimed she sleepwalks and we immediately suspected foul play. Unfortunately, the security camera footage for that night had been removed so we couldn’t verify her story.
We let her go and tracked her as we thought she could lead us to the chandelier. Sometime later she made a trip to Mexico in the middle of nowhere. We thought she stashed the chandelier there, so we set up a raid with the Mexican police. On the day of her arrival, we raided her cottage only to find her sitting around in lingerie, with no chandelier in sight. Trail went cold and we never caught the thief, but the chandelier’s been reportedly sighted in the German black market.
The perfect crime, whether it’s by the girl or some probably very handsome strong and authoritative individual, who probably owns a thriving farm.
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15. Maybe he was just looking for the Best Buy.
I'm a cop, and there’s one guy I recently dealt with who is on parole. I stopped him in my city after he was wandering around late at night near a shopping mall that had been closed for hours. I figured he was probably trying to case the joint. I issue him a warning and let him go.
Anyway, the next day, I got a call from his parole officer who says he was alerted the guy was pulled over and wanted to verify that It was his guy that I stopped. I’m a little confused at first but he goes on to say that the day before, he was scheduled to meet with him but he had an excuse and bailed. His excuse was that he was in the hospital. Well when he spoke with him the following day, he was able to provide documentation that he had entered the hospital day 1 and had left day 2. Well I had stopped him at 1:15 in the morning and after looking at the picture, it was 100% him.
Turns out the guy had checked in then out of the hospital on day 1, then in and out again on day 2. He then re arranged half the paperwork to make it look like he was in the hospital overnight which would make my car stop of him appear like I mixed him up with someone else as well as give him a valid excuse to miss their meeting.
Not sure what’s gonna happen to that guy but I thought it was pretty clever.
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14. Swallow the evidence.
I worked with this one guy who had a lengthy record. He had a system for getting released if he got caught. After committing a crime, if the police were in pursuit and he knew he was about to be cornered, he would act insane. His girl would play along with it telling the police that he was off his medication. The police would arrest him but then send him to a mental ward with papers instructing the ward to release to police once he was cleared. Once he was in the mental ward, he would cause a distraction that would make the person attending the desk with the file cabinet to leave said cabinet. He would then crawl to the file cabinet, look for his "release to police" papers, and then would literally eat the papers. When the psych evaluators decided that he was stable enough to be released, there would be no instructions to send him to the police, and he would be released to the general public. He did this about 10 times until police officers noticed him back on the streets. This stunt forced the state to change their procedure for detaining mentally unstable suspects.
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13. Spare some change?
Several years ago in Cape Coral FL, a man disguised as a homeless person waited on a sidewalk in front of a Publix grocery store and used a taser on an armored car guard carrying too bags of money. A getaway driver in a car with stolen tags pulled up and they took off. Never caught.
Image by Capri23auto from Pixabay
12. When your first day on the job becomes your first day in jail.
The story of the Mumbai Opera House jewellery heist probably belongs here. Sometime in 1987 a guy placed an ad in the newspaper looking for recruits to the CBI, the investigative police agency in India. A bunch of people showed up. He'd rented an office to interview them. He selected 26 of the candidates, told them to assemble the next day near a popular jewellery shop to practise a "mock raid." He had a fake search warrant and all handy.
Then he led these guys to conduct a raid on the jewellery shop. Together they collected all the jewellery in the shop, took all the cash, and then he asked the "trainees" to keep a watch on the shop employees while he "deposited" the stuff. He then walked out and disappeared.
Took half an hour for someone to suspect something wrong and call the actual police.
They never caught the guy. Never even found out who he was.
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11. Did I stutter?
A friend who's a police officer told me about a B&E alarm he and his team responded to. No one was there to report the alarm, it must have been a security monitoring company that called.
When police showed up, everything seemed normal, most lights were off, and there was an employee still working. He explained he was there working late and must have set off an alarm.
They almost believed him until he said “uhh” before saying the name of the company he worked for. After that it was downhill but with a little more research he would have pretty much gotten away with it.
Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay
10. Not-so-grand theft auto.
A guy I knew bought and financed a car. He didn't make a single payment, and after 90 days the repo men came looking but can't find it. Over a year later, an auto repair shop filed a "mechanics lien" on the vehicle for over 15,000 dollars of custom rims, tires, upholstery, engine work, and a completely awesome (awful) paint job. So the auto finance company wasn't not gonna shell out 15K to get this now non-desirable car. So they signed the title over to the mechanic, who just happened to gift the car to the original owner. The original owner's credit is ruined, but what does he care. He had a brand new car, which he had been driving after about 6 months of hiding it.
Pixabay
9. So that cheque did get lost in the mail.
A guy in my town stole a post office mailbox off the street and repainted it to look like the night deposit box at a bank. Then he hung an out-of-order sign on the real deposit box and put his fake painted one next to it. All the businesses came along and dropped off their deposits in the mailbox, which the guy cam and retrieved in the morning. Never got caught.
Image by Capri23auto from Pixabay
8. Dumpster diving has never looked so good.
A guy I went to highschool had been stealing from Walmart in a pretty clever way. He would grab video games, mp3 players, etc. and throw them away in a trash can in the garden section. The workers never checked the trash contents and he would just wait, sometimes 5 hours until they emptied the trash in the back dumpster and hop in to get his items. Once he took a cardboard box from a display inside, filled it with video games, a PS3, and extra controllers. He grabbed some tape and pens and drew all over the box and taped it up to make it look used and tossed it. An hour later he had a whole new PS3 and stack of games.
7. This is why duct tape is so expensive.
I knew this guy who would print barcodes, bring them into Home Depot and stick them on merchandise in the $100 range. When scanned, the items came up around the $10 range. Putting random barcodes on things isn't really illegal and it's super hard to notice. The guy's friend would come in an hour later and buy the underpriced stuff. Complete plausible deniability. They would then sell the stuff on Ebay. Only reason they got caught is because the guy with the barcode printer cut the second guy out of the operation so the accomplice stole a bunch of barcodes, put them on the merchandise and paid for it immediately afterwards. He then proceeded to rat on the first guy and spilled the beans they had been doing this on a weekly basis for over four years. Because they could only pin the one case on him, the burglary was dropped down to a pretty theft and he walked away with a few days in county and a small fine. He probably took Home Depot for tens of thousands over the years.
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6. Who knew those rock-climbing lessons would come in handy.
One of the main streets in my city is cut into a hillside and, as a result, there is a very steep and quite tall concrete-covered bank immediately behind the buildings. Between two buildings there is an alley with an ATM. To access it for filling, the security staff had to go through the next door building, out a side door and into the alley, which had the ATM at one end and the steep bank at the other. On the Friday before Christmas, when the ATM was to be filled to the brim, one of the robbers abseiled down the bank at night into the alley and waited for the guys to arrive to fill the ATM (they came early in the morning). As they came through the door into the alley, he held them up, took the money, and took off through the building to an accomplice waiting in a van on the main street. Then the van took off on the main road out of the city and vanished.
After a big search, the police finally found the burnt-out van. Turned out the gang had driven it up a gorge road and had two other accomplices in cars at the top and bottom of the gorge who simultaneously drove really slowly into the gorge and held up the traffic so that no one was there to see them when they turned off down an access road into some bush.
They ended up being caught, because one of the gang was a former employee of the security company.
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5. Green means go, red means go faster.
There's this family friend of mine, a very funny Australian with an absolutely horrendous accent. In the late 80’s he’s driving through Texas and runs a red light, and is immediately pulled over by a 250-pound Texan police officer with an equally horrendous Texan accent. The way the stories goes this cop is obviously not the brightest chap.
So our friend, when asked about running the red light, gets very apologetic and explains that he gets easily confused because in Australia—you know how things are reversed down there—red means go and green means stop.
The cop actually let this man go with a warning, saying, “I did not know that! Well, in America, red means stop, so don’t make this mistake again.”
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4. No one was using those laptops for schoolwork, anyway.
There was a gang that would rob school computer rooms to steal 30-plus laptops at a time. They would repeatedly activate the alarm and leave. Eventually the zone is either bypassed or the company is told that the zone is faulty and to ignore it. This gang would wait for the security company to get complacent and then they would break in. They managed a few schools in a row before anyone caught on to the pattern.
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3. This is why planning is everything.
Close on 20 years ago now a guy on Australia's Gold Coast got away with a bank robbery in broad daylight.
He cased the bank for a while and discovered a pattern of the bank manager arriving about 30 minutes before anyone else each morning. The manager would leave the front doors unlocked so staff could get in without a key or needing to wait for the boss to come and let them in.
One morning the crook dressed himself up for a busy day of office work and waited for the bank manager to arrive. As the manager was unlocking the doors he made his move, entering the building and threatening the manager with a gun. He got all the details he'd need to access the vault and so forth and then tied the manager up and stuffed him in his office.
When the staff arrived he told them that the manager had called in sick and that regional office had sent him in to supervise and no one batted an eyelid. This bank had a small walk-in vault that normally only held about 30-50k on any given day but this guy had timed his robbery for the morning when all the local small businesses would make their end of week deposits and reportedly got a score of close to 250k.
Once the vault was open he pulled his gun out and invited all the staff to enter the vault and locked them in. By this stage the bank was due to be open so when he went to leave there were a number of customers waiting to get inside to do their banking. He told them all that there had been an issue with the computers and that the tech team had estimated it would take about 30 minutes before the issue would be resolved and that they couldn't open until then.
Then he got into his car and drove straight to the airport and flew to Hong Kong and then disappeared.
To my knowledge the cops never caught him and never managed to find the money - they knew he'd have had to leave most of it in Australia somewhere because you can only take 10k in cash out of the country before customs pulls you into their interview rooms. The assumption was that he had to have an accomplice here who would funnel the money to him slowly over time.
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2. So, how about that local sports team?
This happened to a friend of mine. He walked out one morning to drive to work only to find his car missing. He reported the car stolen to police. A few days later, his car was sitting back in front of his house. Inside, he finds a note. It was an apology that said the "thief" was in dire need of quick transportation and so he "borrowed" the first car he found with the keys inside. The thief noticed the sticker on the car for the local sports team, and just so there were no hard feelings, he left four tickets to an upcoming game in the glove box for my friend and his family. So my friend and his family attend the game, but when they returned home they found the house had been ransacked and everything they owned was gone.
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1. Pretty sure this is the plot of an Audrey Hepburn movie.
Most criminals are pretty smart and this guy was no exception. He wanted to rob a jewellery store on our city's main street. So he found out the flat beside the jewellers was empty and he hid there. For two weeks he triggered the alarm on purpose several times a night. It was a massive headache for the police and the business, we turned up to see nothing there, nothing on cameras, thought it was just a fluke so the jewellers turned off the alarm system and said they'd wait until the morning to get a new one installed or that one re-wired because something wasn't right. As soon as he heard that and the police leaving he tore down the wall (he'd already been working on this apparently) and robbed the place, taking his sweet time. Escaped without anyone noticing anything for hours, until the jewellers came back to open the store in the morning. Then he tried to re-sell something he stole which had a serial number on it and got caught. So not that smart after all. Good effort though.
