A 61-year-old man from Tokyo’s Ota Ward was recently arrested by Japanese police for allegedly stealing no less than 159 bicycle seats, as a bizarre way of taking revenge for having his own seat stolen last year.

Earlier this month, Akio Hatori was apprehended for the alleged theft of a bicycle seat on August 29. Surveillance camera footage showed him casually removing the seat of someone’s bike, placing it in the basket of his own bicycle and pedalling away. Unfortunately for him, the victim called the police and they started investigating the minor theft. However, when officers identified Hatori and raided his house last week, they only expected to find the one seat, not a stash of 159 of them.

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A Texas man is wanted on a third-degree felony aggravated forgery charge after police discovered that he was trying to get a divorce from his wife without her even knowing he was divorcing her.

Paul Nixon, 51, of Harris County, in Texas, allegedly forged his wife’s signature as well as that of a public notary to make it look as if his spouse had consented to the divorce. According to court records, Nixon filed for divorce on February 15 – ironically, the day after Valentine’s Day – and a judge signed an order that made the divorce official in April. A Harris County constable told reporters that his ex-wife only learned that Nixon had divorced her in may, when she confronted him about his unusual money spending.

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Not everyone chooses to use their superpowers for good; case in point, this Japanese store clerk who used his amazing photographic memory to memorize the credit card info of over a thousand clients in mere seconds of interacting with them.

34-year-old Yusuke Taniguchi was recently arrested for having stolen the credit card information of over 1,300 people and then using it to by things for himself on the internet. Apparently, Taniguchi worked as a part-time clerk at a shopping mall in Koto City, Tokyo, where he would use his trained photographic memory to steal people’s private information whenever they used their credit cards to buy something. In the few seconds it took to process a payment, the clerk would memorize the card’s 16-digit-number, the holder’s name, expiry date, and security code, all the elements needed to later use the card for online shopping.

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NASA is said to be investigating a claim that one of its astronauts accessed the bank account of her estranged spouse while on board the International Space Station, in what may be the first crime committed in space.

Astronaut Anne McClain and Summer Worden, an Air Force intelligence officer, married in 2014 and split in 2018, when Ms. Worden filed for divorce. The pair have been involved in a custody battle over Worden’s young son for the past year, but things git even more complicated recently after Worden accused her ex-spouse of illegally accessing her bank account from aboard the ISS. McCain admitted logging into the bank account from outer space, but denied any wrong-doing, claiming that she was just keeping an eye on the family finances to make sure their son was well taken care of.

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The pastor of a Christian church in Ogun State, Nigeria, was recently arrested after allegedly stealing an SUV from a car dealership and later selling it for half its list price.

41-year-old Jeremiah Ehindero, the pastor of Jesus Miracle Church, recently visited a car dealership under the pretext of wanting to buy a Toyota Highlander SUV for evangelical purposes. After negotiating a final price of N1.2 million ($3,300) for the car, the holy man requested that he be allowed to take it for a test drive before making the purchase. Customers go on test drives all the time, so the dealership staff saw nothing wrong with giving Ehindero the keys to a Toyota Highlander, but when he failed to return in the following 24 hours, they called the police.

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A Michigan man was recently given a surprisingly light prison sentence after being found guilty of repeatedly spiking his wife’s coffee with high doses of sleeping pills.

Therese Kozlowski filed for divorce from her husband, Brian, in June of 2018 but continued living in the same house. In fact, he even made coffee for her every day, which he used as an opportunity to feed her dangerous doses of diphenhydramine, an antihistamine mainly used to treat allergies and insomnia. Of course, Therese only found out after becoming suspicious and installing hidden cameras all over their house to see what Brian was up to. Shocking footage shows the man breaking up several tablets and dumping them in his wife’s coffee before swishing it around to make the drug melt faster.

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Jennifer Armstrong, a 44-year-old woman from Ireland, is considered by many the country’s most prolific petty criminal, with a record of 648 convictions.

Armstrong recently made headlines in her home country, after showing up in front of a judge for trying to steal a bottle of wine while intoxicated just two days after being released from a 16-month prison sentence. Among her many past offences, the 44-year-old was convicted for crimes like stealing from and harassing people around Dublin city center, assault and public intoxication. During her latest visit in court, the serial thief asked the judge for “one last chance”, and managed to leave with a suspended six-month sentence.

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It’s not unusual for zoo visitors to leave with a stuffed animal as a souvenir, but one Los Angeles teen decided he wanted something better than that, so he stole North America’s oldest-living ring-tailed lemur.

After committing almost three dozen burglaries in the last few years, it’s safe to say that 19-year-old Aquinas Kasbar was used to just taking things that didn’t belong to him. So when he laid eyes on Isaac, a 32-year-old endangered lemur at the Santa Ana Zoo last year and decided he wanted it for a pet, he knew exactly what he had to do. On July 27, 2018 Kasbar reportedly snuck into the zoo after hours and used bolt cutters to cut a hole in the enclosure for lemurs and Capuchin monkeys to get to his prize. Several animals escaped in the chaos, but the teen managed to capture and run away with Isaac.

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What appeared as an amazingly generous gesture turned out to be an act of revenge, after a Florida woman left a $5,000 tip to a waitress using her boyfriend’s credit card to get back at him after an argument.

24-year-old Serina Wolfe was arrested on Monday on a felony theft charge for allegedly using her boyfriend’s credit card to leave an unusually generous $5,000 tip, or 10,000% of her total bill, at the Clear Sky Cafe in Clearwater Beach, on June 27. The waitress initially thought that Wolfe was simply incredibly generous, but later learned that the 24-year-old had gotten into an argument with her boyfriend and used his credit card just to take revenge on him.

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Spanish police reported that a woman who hired her son-in-law to kill her partner recently turned up to file a complaint against him after he failed to live up to his end of the bargain.

Earlier this month, an unnamed woman and her daughter went to a police station in central Madrid to file two separate complaints. One was against the woman’s romantic partner, who had allegedly scammed her out of more than €60,000 ($60,000) over several years, and the second was against her own son-in-law who had agreed to kill her partner and then sell his organs on the black market to recover the substantial amount of money he had swindled. Unfortunately, things didn’t go very well after the latter revelations, as both women and the would-be hitman were immediately arrested.

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In what has been described as one of the most daring rackets in history, one or more individuals used a silicone mask to impersonate France’s minister of defense, Jean-Yves Le Drian, and scam an estimated €80 million ($90 million) from wealthy victims.

Jean-Yves Le Drian served as France’s defense minister from 2012 to 2017, and is currently the country’s Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs. He is an important political figure in his homeland, but also a relatively obscure one, which is why investigators believe he was chosen as the target of one of the boldest identity thefts in recorded history. One or more scammers used a custom silicone mask and a cleverly decorated office to fool various members of government and wealthy businessman into thinking that they were being contacted by Mr. Le Drian who requested financial help to pay the ransoms of journalists captured by Islamists in the Middle East. Some of the victims saw through the ruse, but many complied and donated millions.

The scam was simple yet pretty well thought out. Scammers would pose as a member of Le Drian’s inner circle and contact both french and foreign businessmen to arrange a conversation with the esteemed “minister”. In the beginning, the conversations were carried out over a phone, with the scammer impersonating the French minister reproducing Le Drian’s voice almost to perfection.  But, then, in order to make the  whole thing even more believable, they switched to video calls via Skype.

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An Indian businessman who allegedly staged a stupid plane hijacking hoax to get his wife fired by the airline so they could spend more time together was recently sentenced to life in prison.

Birju Salla, the 38-year-old scion of a wealthy family of jewellers based in Mumbai, became the first person to be sentenced under India’s strict Anti-Hijacking Act of 2016. The funny thing is that he never actually intended to hijack a plane, all he wanted was to get his beloved  fire so they could spend more time together. He told the court that by printing a hijacking threat and planting it in the toilet of a Jet Airways plane, the airline would close its Delhi operation and fire his younger wife, so she would be forced to return to Mumbai where they could be together more. Things didn’t work out quite as planned…

Birju Salla’s troubles began when, during his frequent flights from Mumbai to Delhi, he fell in love with a Jet Airways customer care executive. They began having an affair in 2017, but the businessman quickly became frustrated with how little time they spent together. He felt that her job was always getting in the way of their love, so in July of 2017 he secretly married her – although he was already married and had two children – and asked her to move to Mumbai with him. She refused, and that’s when he allegedly hatched a ridiculously stupid plan to get her fired.

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Police in the Netherlands are offering samples of a special MDMA-scented perfume to the public in the hopes that it will help people detect and report drug labs when they pass by them.

Despite the best efforts of Dutch police to curb drug manufacturing and traffic, the Netherlands is still considered the MDMA production capital of the world. Having exhausted traditional ways of battling drug crime, they’ve now taken an unconventional approach, creating a special perfume called XTACY which has an aroma very similar to the sweet smell of MDMA, a recreational drug commonly known as ‘Ecstasy’. But they’re not selling it. Instead, they’re offering samples to the public, to get them familiarized with the smell of the drug, so that when they casually walk by a drug lab producing the illegal substance, they can notify authorities about it.

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Armed robberies have become so common in Mexico City that people have started buying fake smartphones to hand over to trigger-happy criminals who would rather shoot them than leave empty-handed.

Walking on the street or getting on public transportation in Mexico City have become increasingly risky affairs. According to recently released data, there were an average of 70 violent reported muggings in the Mexican capital in the first four months of 2019. Around two thirds of these crimes targeted pedestrians, while the rest were evenly committed against public transportation passengers and motorists stuck in traffic jams or waiting at traffic lights. The incidence of such crimes has been steadily increasing in the city, but it has gotten so bad that people are now buying fake smartphones to hand over to muggers instead of their real ones.

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A young dog breeder in eastern China was recently arrested and sentenced to ten days in a detention center after giving two of his canines controversial names that refer to Chinese government and civil service workers.

The 30-year-old man, surnamed Ban, was summoned by police on Monday, after posting on Chinese social network WeChat that he had named two of his dogs Chengguan and Xieguan. The first refers to officials tasked with tackling low-level crime, while the second is a name used to describe informal community workers, such as traffic assistants. Ban said that he didn’t know using the two words as names for his dogs was illegal, and that he had done it as a joke, but police failed to see the humor and launched an investigation after the man’s post went viral online.

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