Thursday, October 28, 2010

Memo to Criminals - Grab a Clue, Not an Ipad

It amazes me that there are still criminals who think that it's a positive expected value proposition to steal anything containing a GPS device. 


My mum recently had her handbag and iPad stolen. Because she the iPad linked to her MobileMe account, my brother was able to track it online as it passed through about four houses, and eventually settled at one place. They'd called the police, and the GPS evidence was sufficient for the cops to get a warrant, whereupon they searched the house, found the iPad (after the woman had earlier denied having it), and one more dumb@$$ is now spending time in the slammer for possession of stolen property. 


It gets better though. Apparently, these clowns are not readers of Popehat. If they were, they might have remembered Ken's advice to Shut The #$%@ Up. This Mensa Chapter President decided to call up my mum's house and asked for her by name, claiming to have found her frequent flier card on his table outside his house. My brother asked whether there was anything else there. No, he said, there wasn't, just the frequent flier card. Obviously it didn't occur to this future string theorist that a frequent flier card doesn't contain a person's phone number, and that he was both a) indicating himself as a liar, and b) providing evidence that he had other items from the handbag. Not only that, but he then told my brother that he could pick the card up from his address. My brother noticed that the address he gave was the same as the second house that the iPad had been at. Last I heard, the police were going round to pay him a visit too. 


What a complete tard. If he'd just shut up, it would have been very difficult to prove that he'd done anything wrong - the defense 'I don't know anything about it, maybe the thieves just parked outside my house for a while' would have been likely to create reasonable doubt. Add in the extra evidence he himself provided, and it seems like the Great State of Western Australia will soon be paying his rent too (to paraphrase the Kingston Trio).

2 comments:

  1. In the words of The Joker, "this town deserves a better class of criminal".

    I'm confused, why would a person involved in a theft call your home and ask if you'd like something back?

    The only reason I could think is to lure you there, in an attempt to extract your pin numbers to your bank cards. Which is kind of serious.

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  2. That's one (rather scary) possibility. The other one is that he found out his mate had been charged with possession of stolen goods, was worried how much the cops knew, and came up with a stupid plan to try to cover his ass with a fake story of pretending to find the bag.

    Never underestimate the tendency of criminals to do stupid things when they think the police are on to them.

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