For over a decade, residents of the O Calvario and A Doblada neighborhoods in the Spanish city of Vigo have been living in fear of finding their cars scratched or with toothpicks jammed in the keyhole. The culprit? A 79-year-old man who has reportedly vandalized over 1,000 cars in the last year alone.

Most often than not, vandals try to make sure there are no witnesses before damaging someone else’s property, but that’s not how Jose Antonio V., a 79-year-old man from Vigo, operates. He scratches parked cars and jams toothpicks into their keyholes in broad daylight, with a total disregard disregard for witnesses. And if someone dares to say something or try to stop him, the old man gets aggressive and often hits people with his cane. Police estimate that last year alone, the notorious vandal damaged around 1,120 cars, and he’s off to a “great” start in 2019 as well, with evidence linking him to over 120 vandalized vehicles.

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An insurance agent in Singapore recently got himself arrested after attempting to scam clients by sending them threatening letters signed by “Lord Voldermort”, a misspelling of Lord Voldemort, the main antagonist of the popular Harry Potter books.

Ye Lin Myint, a Myanmar national working for the Singapore branch of Prudential Insurance, targeted potential or former clients who rejected him in the past. They were either potential clients who had refused to get insurance policies from him, or former clients who hadn’t turned up for scheduled appointments or had canceled their insurance policies. In July of 2017, Ye used his wife’s laptop to register an email account with a Switzerland-based email service that did not request any personal, using the name “Lord Voldermort”. He then created a Bitcoin wallet and linked it to the email account and started sending threatening letters to his victims, requesting one Bitcoin in exchange for their safety and that of their families.

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An Irish man who swallowed an expensive diamond ring at a jewellery store in Turkey recently told prosecutors that he wasn’t himself when he did it, because he “fell into a trance” the moment he saw the beautiful diamond.

Ian Campbell, who was vacationing in the Turkish seaside resort of Marmaris, was arrested on October 4, 2018, after swallowing a $40,000 diamond ring at a local jewellery store. Eyewitnesses later told police that Campbell swallowed the jewel in desperation, after realizing that he was going to be caught trying to steal it. Prosecutors instructed police to take the would-be-thief to the local hospital, where he was administered laxatives to help him “return” the 2.5-carat diamond ring by natural means. Turkish media tracked the “journey” of the jewel through Campbell’s stomach almost in real time, but sadly it got stuck and had to be surgically removed.

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A young Alabama vet student was recently arrested for allegedly pulling off one of the sickest scams imaginable. She took older horses from their owners, promising that they would live out the rest of their lives in a sanctuary, but later sold them to be slaughtered.

24-year-old Fallon Blackwood used her educational background as a veterinary student to gain the trust of horse owners who could no longer take care of their older animals. She told several of her victims that she owned an 18-acre farm in Boaz, Alabama, where she could look after the elderly horses, but only if they willingly placed them in her care, as she didn’t have the money to buy them. After taking the horses off their owners’ hands, Blackwood allegedly sold them to kill-buyers to be shipped to Mexican slaughterhouses. The third-year vet student is believed to be responsible for the disappearance of nearly 50 horses.

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A California family recently notified police about a strange man who had expressed his love for their high-tech doorbell in an explicit manner, after security camera footage showed him licking the doorbell button for no logical reason.

The Dungan family had just returned to their Salinas home last Saturday morning when they decided to check the security footage. They had been automatically notified about unusual activity on the premises the night before, but they had been out of time. When they first started getting notifications from the security system, David Dungan thought it was just his stepson coming home from work. One thing’s for sure, the family weren’t expecting a strange man making out with their doorbell button. And yet, that’s exactly what the footage showed.

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A 19-year-old volunteer firefighter from western Pennsylvania was recently charged with arson, criminal mischief and risking catastrophe after allegedly setting two houses on fire out of boredom.

Last month, police in Munhall, a community located about 8 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, arrested Ryan Laubham, a local volunteer firefighter, for allegedly setting fire to a pair of occupied homes on December 3 and 10. After interviewing witnesses and checking CCTV footage, authorities identified Laubham as the prime suspect in both cases, and he himself admitted to the crimes, saying that he had set the houses on fire because he was bored.

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Police in the Russian city of Sevastopol are scrambling to find the vandals responsible for destroying over a dozen speed cameras in the last month.

Reports of damaged stationary speed cameras and the solar panels that power them started coming in at the start of December, and police soon realized that these weren’t just isolated incidents. Someone was targeting them and even getting creative with the means of destruction. First, they started by shooting the cameras with metallic pellets fired from air guns, then they moved to sledgehammers, tearing down the concrete posts the speed cameras were mounted on, and recently they even began setting the expensive cameras on fire. Sevastopol authorities claim that the capture of these vandals is now inevitable, but with 16 destroyed speed cameras reported so far, police has yet to arrest any suspects.

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A Chinese man was recently arrested and charged with fraud for impersonating a police officer. He’s definitely not the first person to do that, but what makes his case special is that he managed to convince everyone around him that he was a real police officer for 12 years.

41-year-old Wang Feng had always wanted to be a police officer, but never actually trained or studied to become one. That didn’t stop him from pretending to be one for over a decade, though. It all started in 2006, when Wang’s brother was involved in a debt dispute case and needed a lawyer. To make sure that his brother’s counsel gave 100% in court, Wang met with the man and pretended to be a police officer at the Haiyan Baibu Police Station, in Baibu Town, China’s Zhejiang Province. The ruse actually worked, which made Wang Feng want to try it on others as well. Soon, he started telling friends and acquaintances that he had become a police officer, bought a fake uniform, handcuffs, and even had a fake ID done.

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A Missouri poacher who is suspected to have illegally killed hundreds of deer over the past decade has recently been ordered to watch the Disney classic ‘Bambi’ at least once a month for one year, as part of his sentence.

It’s not clear exactly how many deer David Berry and his two sons – David Berry Jr. and Kyle Berry – have poached in the forests of southern Missouri over the last nine years, but investigators suspect that the number reaches into the hundreds. The three men hunted the defenceless animals mostly at night, cutting off their heads and antlers as trophies and leaving the bodies to rot where they fell. Although their cruel and illegal activities were financially motivated, police evidence suggests that cutting off the heads of the deer was mostly about satisfying the poachers’ personal egos. Now, one of the twelve men accused in what has been described as one of the largest deer poaching cases in the history of Missouri will have to watch the Disney classic ‘Bambi’ repeatedly to hopefully realize the error of his ways.

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A Thai conman was recently arrested and charged with robbery after successfully pulling out a sophisticated plan that involved setting up a fake jewlery store and luring an Indian businessman there so he could steal a valuable diamond.

59-year-old Pipatpongpat Suksawatpipat, the man arrested for the ingenious robbery, was once a prosperous jewlery trader himself, but fell on hard time when he became addicted to gambling a few years back. He went from being one of the richest people in Chanthaburi to having just 40,000 baht ($1,200) to his name, but he recently put that small amount of money to good use and pulled off a scam that would make any self-respecting conman jealous. In just a week’s time, he managed to rent a commercial space and turn it into a fake jewelery store, lure an Indian jeweler there with a 10 million baht diamond, and eventually steal that diamond before riding out into the sunset. Alas, his success was short-lived.

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Police in the Taiwanese city of Taipei were accused of wasting taxpayers’ money on solving stupid cases, after local media revealed that they recently conducted DNA tests worth hundreds of dollars to find out who drank a student’s $2 yogurt bottle.

Sharing a fridge with roommates in college usually means accepting that, from time to time, some of your treats will mysteriously disappear. It’s like a tradition, but for one Taiwanese woman sharing a house with five other women studying at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei, it was a serious crime that had to be solved at any cost. Last month, the unnamed woman came home to find one of her yogurt bottles empty in the garbage bin. None of her housemates had asked her permission to drink the yogurt, so she fished the empty bottle from the trash, convened an emergency house meeting and asked the other five women which one of them had stolen her yogurt. When none of them owned up to the crime, the infuriated woman took the empty yogurt bottle to the police and demanded that they carry out an official investigation and bring the criminal to justice.

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A university student who recently had his laptop stolen allegedly received an apology email from the thief, in which the person tried to justify the crime by claiming that they were really poor.

The apologetic email went viral on Twitter after Birmingham-resident Stevie Valentine shared a screengrab of it captioned “So my flat mates laptop got stolen today, please pree what the thief sent him”. The thief starts off by writing that he/she is “very, very sorry” for stealing the laptop, and then tries to justify the crime by stating that he/she is “extremely poor” and “needed the money”. The alleged laptop thief then goes on to write that he/she could have also taken the victim’s phone and wallet, but chose not to. “I left your phone and wallet, so I hope that slightly makes up for something,” the email reads.

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Russian media recently reported the comical case of a burglar who last week broke into an office building in the city of Orenburg and then fell asleep in an office chair.

The botched burglary took place on November 20th, when a 36-year-old man fraudulently entered a private office building on Sharlykskoye Road, in Orenburg, by squeezing through a small window on the third floor. He then used a variety of tools, like screwdrivers, wire cutters, a hammer, a nail puller, and a bunch of keys, to break into several private company offices, looking for valuables. He had actually managed to find 140,000 rubles ($2,100) in cash, but instead of hurrying out of the building before being spotted, the mad decided to get a bit of rest and sat down in a leather chair. And that’s where police found him sleeping, several hours later.

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A Russian scientist working at the Bellingshausen research station on King George Island, in Antarctica, was charged with attempted murder after he stabbed a fellow colleague with a kitchen knife for allegedly revealing the endings of books that he was reading.

55-year-old Sergey Savitsky and Oleg Beloguzov, 52, had been working together at Russia’s remote Bellingshausen for four years and they were both known to their colleagues as professionals. However, on October 9th, Savitsky reportedly took a kitchen knife and plunged it into Beloguzov’s chest, in what has been referred to as the first known attempted murder in Antarctica, ever. It will probably go down in history as one of the strangest as well, as investigators recently revealed that a possible explanation for the crime could be the spoiling of book endings.

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A group of six delinquents have been dubbed “the dumbest robbers in Belgium” after falling for a trick so simple that Dumb and Dumber could see through it.

The unbelievably stupid robbery attempt took place on Saturday, when a group of six armed men walked into an e-cigarette shop on the outskirts of the Belgian city of Charleroi. They asked the owner to empty the register and give them the money. It was the middle of the afternoon, so the quick-thinking salesman told them that he had barely sold anything, and that if they really wanted to to make some money, they should come back at closing time. He even tried to sweeten the deal by telling the robbers that they could probably walk away with 2,000 to 3,000 euros if they followed his advice. But what respectable criminals would fall for that stupid trick, right? Well, these guys did.

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