“How Did They Even Think Of This?” 35 Criminals Who Outsmarted Authorities

Most of them are really stupid so this guy isn't a criminal mastermind but here goes. He wanted to rob a jewellers on our city's main street. So he found out the flat beside the jewellers was empty and he hid there. For 2 weeks he triggered the alarm on purpose several times a night, 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 (hed 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 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.

Worked at a jail. After getting off work, I watched an ex inmate (homeless) being released, he walked over to a patrol car, looked me in the eye, and the 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.

There was this car park outside a local tourist attraction. Because it was city land a booth was set up to collect parking fees. It cost something like 5 dollars/pounds/euros to park. The old man collecting the fees was a pleasant chap, never missed a day of work in ten years, rain or shine.

One day the tourist attraction hears there is nobody manning the booth. Because it is a city-owned lot, they call the city to ask where the parking attendant is.

The city says “What parking attendant?”

Old man was never heard or seen again. He built the booth himself and manned it for ten years.

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, and they walk out. 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.

My dad told me a story about a crew of shoplifters who would go into expensive tailors and the like and release a pigeon. While everyone was fussing over trying to capture the pigeon, they would help themselves to a few suits etc. Before the days of security cameras, so seems like it could have happened.

I'm not a cop but I worked crime scene. This guy had attached GPS to the bottom of peoples cars who owned houses, he wanted to rob. He did it to ensure they wouldn't be showing up while he was ransacking the place.

I once dealt with a criminal who successfully forged court documents, facilitating his own release from prison

Not a cop: there was an incident in Fargo ND 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 (correction: 9 access points). 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.

Edit: went looking for the news articles but found [the case](https://caselaw.findlaw.com/nd-supreme-court/1266964.html).

Here's one. I knew this guy back in the early 80's, let's call him Jim. well he really wanted this high powered superbike but he knew he couldn't ever afford it, so what he did was to take 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 hi 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, ( from the serial number on the bottom half of the engine and frame) and that the insurance company had classed the bike as a write off, and had told the cops to dispose of it.
NOW....

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. 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 a 'q' reg (stolen and recovered).

I forgot to call him Jim didn't I?

Obligatory "not a cop, but..."

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 where he would leave the front doors unlocked so staff could help themselves 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 do the open shop thing 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 old mate had timed his robbery for the morning after business banking day 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 aud in cash in any currency out of the country before customs pulls you into their interview rooms so the assumption was that he had to have an accomplice here who would funnel the money to him slowly over time.

Edit: For those wondering, he was identified later after witness statement and CCTV led to his getaway car being discovered at the airport where he boarded a plane destined for Hong Kong which is as far as they could track him.

There's a hoarder on block the whose porch is covered in junk. There's also someone trying to sell their house. For some reason people on Craigslist seem to think that everything on the hoarders porch is free to take even though the hoarder has made numerous calls to the police saying it isn't and denies posting it on Craigslist herself. I wonder who could have the motive to do such a thing.

Homeless guy in my home town figured out if he committed some act of petty theft he'd get a night in jail, a warm place to sleep and a hot meal. He'd show up, turn in his stolen goods and that would be that.

After a while the police would just tell him to take back whatever he stole the next day. Quite the town character.

Think it was last year. Some bloke in France went to one of those big supermarkets in which they have pretty much everything and took a PS4. Proceeded to rip off the label en went to the produce section and weighed the PS after having selected apples, sticks the printed price for apples to the ps. Man payed 9€ for a PlayStation and walked out of the store.

Not a cop, and wouldn't call this the smartest thing ever, but it was pretty amusing and clever.

A while back, there was a series of thefts along the bus lines in my country. People's things kept missing from one city to the next, and nobody had any idea what happened as things were presumably safe in the bottom of the bus which nobody except the driver had the access to.

What happened?

Apparently there were two guys, one of whom was really small. You get where this is going. The big guy would put the little guy in a suitcase, buy a ticket to somewhere, load him up with the rest of the luggage, and enjoy the ride, while the little guy went out, stole people's electronics, jewelry, cameras and whatnot, then returned to his suitcase until the ride was over.

Not really sure how they caught them, but it was pretty amusing to read about, and i found the whole thing clever enough.

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” means “drivers license” in Polish.

Clarification: It was 50 different people, the police just wrote down their name as “Prawo Jazdy” every time someone with a Polish drivers license was caught speeding.

Dude noticed that the bank vault had put it's safety deposit box is in a way that there was a space at the 90 degree point that 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 which alarms violently to see if there are sound sensors in the vault. Waited outside, nothing...

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 hair dresser 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.

Made a movie Inside Man loosely based on him. His name was William smarto


Here is the story https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1985-03-04-8501120674-story,amp.html.

My favorite was the guy who stole a post office mailbox off the street, repainted it, and then put it next to the night deposit box at a bank. And hung an out-of-order sign on the deposit box. All the businesses came along and dropped off their deposits in the mailbox.

Not a police officer but when I was younger and worked retail we had some kids come in and take a bunch of nike sneakers. They had one person go to the opposite side of the store and set off a bunch of fire crackers. When loss prevention ran over to see what was happening they ran out the emergency door on the opposite side of our building. I figured it out real fast and chased after them but they had a getaway car waiting and they almost ran me over.

A friend of my brother moved to Israel where for a period of time it was/is 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 card (Costco is a membership-based retail warehouse in the US and a few other countries. 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. Friend framed the ticket and still has it hanging on his wall.

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 explosive 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, etc.

The guys then called in a threat on the bridge.

And started robbing stuff on the other side.

The police couldn't be positive the threat was real or not and hesitated long enough to give the thieves a head start.