A convicted Italian mafia member who has been on the run for almost two decades was recently arrested after being spotted by chance on Google Maps in a small Spanish town.

Gioacchino Gammino, a convicted murderer listed among Italy’s most wanted gangsters, had been on the run for nearly 20 years when he was arrested in Galapagar, a town near Madrid, last month. He had escaped Rome’s Rebibbia jail in 2002 and in 2003 he had been sentenced to life in prison for a murder committed years earlier. A European arrest warrant was issued in 2014, and authorities had managed to track Gammino to Spain, but it was a Google Maps screenshot of two men chatting outside a fruit and vegetable shop that helped police confirm his exact location and make the arrest.

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A Chinese man was recently convicted of theft after reportedly drugging his ex-girlfriend and then opening her eyes to unlock her smartphone and transfer money from her account to his.

Breakups can be difficult, painful even, but sometimes it’s not just your heart that’s left broken, but your bank account as well. Take this strange case that recently went viral on Chinese social media. A 28-year-old man was sentenced to over three years in prison for drugging his ex-girlfriend and unlocking her phone while she was unconscious in order to deplete her bank account and settle his gambling debts. He managed to transfer 150,000 yuan ($23,500), before making himself scarce and taking her mobile phone with him.

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A 45-year-old woman who stole her estranged daughter’s identity managed to fool everyone that she was 22 for two years, enrolling in university and dating boyfriends who were convinced she was in her early 20s.

Laura A. Oglesby risks spending five years behind bars without parole, as part of a plead deal, after admitting to stealing her 22-year-old daughter’s identity and comitting Social Security fraud. The 45-year-old woman had lived with her daughter in Jonesboro, Arkansas, before moving in Missouri, after they lost contact. In 2016, after reportedly fraudulent Social Security card in her daughter’s name, she used that card to obtain a driver’s license. A year later, the woman also enrolled at Southwest Baptist University in Missouri, as her daughter, and even applied for student loans and grants in her name. The charade went on for two years, and no one once questioned Oglesby’s age, apparently convinced that she was 22.

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A Chinese man recently went through the worst week of his life after being arrested five times in only three days due to his uncanny resemblance to a prison escapee.

In October of 2021, a criminal by the name of Zhu Xianjian managed to escape from a prison in Northeast China’s Jilin Province. Authorities scrambled to locate him, but after spending valuable and time and resources they were forced to offer a 150,000 reward, which was then bumped up to 700,000 yuan, for any information on the fugitive’s whereabouts. This made Zhu a valuable target in a part of China where the average monthly income is only 2,000, and an unlucky doppelganger of the criminal suffered the most for it, after being arrested by police no less than five times in three days.

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A Michigan woman who turned to a bogus rent-a-hitman website to have an assassin kill her ex-husband was recently convicted for solicitation of murder.

The internet is amazing. You can find just about any kind of information or service if you put in the work and do some research, but when it comes to hiring someone to be your hitman, you may want to skip the obvious options. Wendy Wein, a 52-year-old woman from Michigan who wanted her ex-husband dead, failed to do just that. She found the website RentAHitman.com and assumed that it was a legitimate business where vengeful people like her could find professionals to do their dirty work for them. It won’t surprise anyone that this wasn’t the case and that she is now facing at least nine years behind bars.

RentAHitman.com promises confidentiality, boasts about complying with HIPPA, which apparently stands for the non-existent “Hitman Information Privacy & Protection Act of 1964,” features testimonies from satisfied customers, including women who caught their husbands cheating, and offers access to a network of over 17,000 “field operatives”. And that’s apparently more than enough for people to put in an order for a hitman…

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A Hungarian man has been accused of jumping in front of a train and having both legs cut off by the metal wheels in order to claim over $3.2 million in insurance payouts.

Sandor Cs., a 54-year-old man from the Hungarian village of Nyircsaszari, lost both of his legs in a horrific incident in 2014. He claimed that on the fateful day of July 30, 2014, he was walking near the train track when he happened to step on a piece of glass, which caused him to lose balance and fall in front of a speeding train. The injuries to both his legs were so severe that he had to have them both amputated from the knees down, and he spent months in a wheelchair before getting prosthetic limbs. However, insurance companies have spent the last seven years gathering evidence in an attempt to prove that Sandor willingly in order to collect a fortune in payouts.

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A Connecticut woman has been accused of stealing over $600,000 from her husband’s bank account over the last 20 years and trying to cover it up by making him think he has Alzheimer’s disease.

Donna Marino was arrested last week for reportedly stealing money in the form of pension checks, workers’ compensation payments, and Social Security income from her husband of 20 years. When the man’s daughter discovered paperwork related to credit cards her father knew nothing about, she notified the police, convinced that her stepmother had taken control of the family finances. It was at that point that the unnamed man admitted to leaving Marino in charge of finances, because she had convinced him that he had Alzheimer’s disease.

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An Indian man was found guilty of murdering his wife by renting a cobra to bite her and make it look like an accident, so he could take her jewelry and marry another woman.

In what has been described as a modern murder mystery, a young man from the Kollam District of the Indian state of Kerala was convicted of arranging and carrying out his wife’s murder with the help of a venomous snake. The heinous crime took place in May of 2020, but investigators needed over a year to collect the necessary evidence to charge the husband. In fact, the 32-year-old man might have gotten away with murder if not for the wife’s parents, who suspected foul play and filed a complaint against him.

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Over two dozen people taking a national exam that could lead to a career in teaching were caught cheating Bluetooth-enabled flip flops to get an edge over the stiff competition.

Cheating has always been a big problem in India, especially during potentially life-changing exams. I remember watching surreal scenes of people climbing the walls of a school building in Bihar to hand cheat sheets to the students taking their year-end exams inside a few years ago, or army applicants forced to take exams in their underwear to prevent cheating. This year, authorities in Rajasthan went as far as cutting the internet connection in the state during the exam to prevent cheating, but they still couldn’t prevent savvy cheaters from trying to get a leg up through nefarious ways. The latest method of cheating reportedly involves Bluetooth-connected flip-flops sold by criminal gangs for up to 600,000 rupees ($8,000) per pair.

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A Chinese food stall owner was recently arrested after admitting to adding poppy husk powder to his dishes to get patrons hooked on them.

In late August of this year, the Lunan Police Station in Lianyungang City, China’s Jiangsu Province, received information that a local hot noodle stall owner might be using illegal ingredients to make his food more appetizing and more addictive. Apparently, the anonymous whistleblower had recently watched public safety warning videos about shady businessmen lacing their food with poppy husks to make them seem more appetizing, and wondered if the food stall that made the delicious hot noodles he loved so much was doing the same thing. As it turned out, they were in fact adding poppy husk powder to the noodles, to make them literally addictive, as a way to boost business.

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Authorities in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro are currently investigating how a local man was able to receive at least five doses of three different Covid-19 vaccines in just 10 days.

According to official records, the unnamed man started getting Covid-19 vaccines in May, and continued getting new jabs into June, until his vaccination marathon was finally discovered by staff at a vaccination station earlier this month while attempting to get yet another Covid shot. Records obtained by Brazilian media show that the man got his first Pfizer shot on May 12, the second dose of AstraZeneca on June 5, the second dose of Coronavac on June 17, another second dose of Pfizer, on July 9th, and the “first dose” of Coronavac on 21 July. It’s not clear what his sixth dose was supposed to be.

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An Englishman dubbed “Silent Man” has caused numerous traffic jams in his home city of Swansea over the last seven years by simply standing in the middle of traffic. Because he never says a word, no one has any idea why he does it.

Ever since 2014, David Hampson has repeatedly hindered traffic by standing in the middle of the road, in the exact same spot. The 51-year-old is subject to a criminal behavior order which forbids him from obstructing any public highway in England and Wales, but judging by his past action, he doesn’t care much about such accusations. In 2018, Hampson was sentenced to three years in prison for blocking the road in exactly the same spot as always, just outside the Swansea Central Police Station. And just as always, he refused to offer any explanation, or say anything else for that matter. The same thing happened the last time he decided to block the road, in December of 2020. Now he faces criminal charges.

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A young African man was recently placed under arrest after he tried to pass as a woman while trying to pass the graduation exam on behalf of his girlfriend.

22-year-old Khadim Mboup, a student of the Gaston Berger de Saint-Louis University, in Diourbel, Senegal, managed to fool faculty and supervisors at a Baccalaureate (high-school graduation exam) examination center into thinking that he was a female high-school student for 3 days. Mboup wore a long-hair wig partially covered with a traditional scarf, earrings, a dress, bra and even face makeup to pass as his girlfriend, 19-year-old Gangué Dioum. Just when the two lovers’ plan seemed to work, one of the supervisors noticed something odd about Khadim, and his true identity was discovered.

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A contractor who didn’t receive the payment he was promised rented an excavator and destroyed the façade of an apartment building he himself built.

Tenants were supposed to move into a newly completed apartment building in Blumberg, a small town in Germany’s Baden-Wurttemberg, in the next couple of weeks, but a bizarre incident has delayed their plans by at least three months. Late last month, a man operating an excavator showed up at the building and began meticulously tearing down the façade, breaking glass windows and destroying balconies, ultimately leaving the place looking like it had been in a war. Stranger still was that the man responsible for the devastation was allegedly the contractor who had been responsible for building the edifice in the first place.

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Seven years after being busted for allegedly stealing over 200 pairs of women’s shoes, a Japanese man was once again arrested and deprived of his collection of 139 pairs of women’s footwear.

On June 10, following the raid of a local man’s home, police in Murakami, Japan displayed a rather unusual haul – 139 pairs of worn nurse shoes, high-heel pumps and sandals, neatly arranged on a large blue tarp. They had been found in the possession of Tsunehito Isobe, a 47-year-old office worker known to have a strange fetish for used women’s shoes. Interestingly, the same man had been arrested for the exact same crime seven years earlier, when his 200-pair collection was confiscated by police.

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