Police Officers Share The Smartest Criminal They've Encountered (r/AskReddit)

police officers have read it who's the smartest criminal you've ever encountered 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 sent 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 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 a guy i went to high school had been stealing from walmart in a pretty clever way he would grab video games mp3 players beer 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 five 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 this was in the late 90s early 2000s a guy in my dorm came to school solely to deal drugs he took out student loans registered for a bunch of 300 person freshman survey courses where he would never be missed then literally never went to class all he did was go to raves and concerts and keggers and sell party drugs after the first semester he was suspended he wrote the usual i was young and dumb and in over my head sob story and got put on probation for a semester so he had a repeat of the fall at the end of the year he was kicked out and didn't care he made something on the order of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in return for about eight thousand dollars in student loans to cover a year of housing and tuition so far as i know he was never caught it may have been a short-sighted maneuver in the long run but in the short run it seemed fairly genius to effectively use federal loans to start your drug business i'm not a cop but i worked crime scene this guy had attached gps to the bottom of people's 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 heard about one person that pulled a sharp lifting scam on a large popular and well-known us 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 doorman the thumbs up having just interacted with the customer this took place before widespread inventory controls and cameras absolutely everywhere i remember an officer telling me about a b and d 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 explains he was there working late and must have set off an alarm they almost believed him until he said huh 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 most of them are really stupid so this guy isn't a criminal mastermind but here goes he wanted to rob a jewelers on our city's main street so he found out the flat beside the jewelers was empty and he hid there for two 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 jewelers turned off the alarm system and said they'd wait until the morning to get a new one installed or that one rewired because something wasn't right as soon as he heard that and the police leaving he tore down the wall had already been working on this apparently and robbed the place taking his sweet time escaped without anyone noticing anything for hours until the jewelers came back in the morning then he tried to resell something he stole which had a serial number on it and got caught so not that smart after all good effort though a french thief who spent 10 years in prison became a comedian when he got out one of his stories finds a building goes in chooses a floor and transforms the exit door into an extra apartment puts the apartment number fake lock welcome rug etc puts an iphone for sale the person comes to buy it he opens the door in a shower band says give me one second i'm just gonna count the money and poof he's gone from the exit stairs a friend of my brother moved to israel where for a period of time it was slashes 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 u.s 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 are 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 reminds me of a family friend of mine very funny australian with an absolutely horrendous bogan accent well late 80s he's driving through texas and runs a red light and is immediately pulled over by a 250 pounds texan police officer with an equally horrendous accent the way the story goes this man 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 i did not know that well in america red means stop so don't make this mistake again one guy 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 super hard to notice guy 2 will come in an hour later and by the underpriced staff complete plausible deniability they would then sell the stuff on ebay only reason they got caught is because the guy with the barcode printer software cut the second guy out of the operation so guy 2 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 there had been doing this on a weekly basis for over four years because we could only pin the one case on him the burglary was dropped down to petty theft and he walked away with a few days in county and a small fine dude probably took home depot for tens of thousands over the years 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 third guy knew what the deal was if someone tried selling this one particular necklace 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 five years to the sentence probably someone who committed a crime i never solved with that being said i had a guy use 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 like three four minutes to call into us giving him a good five-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 edit so part of the building was built into a hill so the hole was on the back side of the building along the grade line but when you're inside the building it was about eight feet up so it was easier for him to leave out a door also the wall section where he broke through was hollow cement block the portion of the wall below that was poured concrete not a police officer but was an iran college my university owned all the houses adjacent to campus these were unlike dorms with ra in 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 upper-class men 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 housing director's name sent me for health and wellness checks she'd find their boots 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 mail housing they did an investigation and asked other residents incidents dated back previous two years never found out who it was here's one i knew this guy back in the early 80s 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 a drive to london and scout it about for a few days until he found that particular model parked outside a house he goes back that night with a slide hammer pulls a lock and steals a 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 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 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 frame back from them repaints it then puts it all back together and re-registers it as a cue reg stolen and recovered i forgot to call him jim didn't i same thing as the computer rooms guys would cut the power to electrical stations damage the wiring then hide waiting for the cops to show up once the owners of the buildings came they would shut off the power because of the unsafe wiring that would have to be repaired in the morning everyone would leave for the night then they would cut away all the non-powered wiring to get the copper not a policeman here but i have a nice story from insurance debt collectors there was this guy who was already in heaps of debt like more than a lifetime's 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 got his loans and credit cards emptied them out and left the country

Channel: Best Posts & Comments

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Keywords: r/ask reddit, r/ askreddit, best posts and comments, askreddit top posts, reddit top posts, askreddit cops stories, askreddit criminal stories, askreddit crime stories, reddit crime stories

Id: ueJG6_ccqKQ

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 12 2019