Chinese media recently reported the story of a scrupulous Lothario who dated dozens of women at the same time, scamming them out of millions of dollars over a period of two years.

On March 20th, a woman arrived at a police precinct in Zhengzhou, China’s Henan Province, to file a rather unusual complaint. Apparently, she had been defrauded of more than 9 million yuan ($1.3 million) by her boyfriend, who she had met in 2019. The accused, a man named Zhang Nan, had deceived the woman, claiming to be the son and grandson of powerful public officials, and asking for important sums of money over the last couple of years. This sort of romantic scams are not entirely unheard of in China, but what made this case special was that the police investigation revealed that Zhang had scammed at least 20 women who he had been dating at the same time.

The woman who filed the original complaint, henceforth referred to by the pseudonym Zhang Li, told investigators that he had met the scammer at a car wash one day. He seemed very nice and after texting on WeChat for a while, they became romantically involved. She was emotionally vulnerable at the time, and fell right into Zhang Nan’s trap, believing his web of lies and ignoring all the warning signs.

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An Ecuadorian TV reporter and his camera crew got the scares of their lives after being held at gunpoint by a masked robber, while doing a live piece.

On February 12, Diego Ordinola, a journalist for Ecuador’s DirecTV Sports, was reporting from outside the Isidro Romero Carbo Monumental Stadium, the home of the Barcelona SC soccer club, when a man wearing a baseball cap and face mask approached him and pulled out a gun. The masked assailant can be heard asking for the crew’s telephones, and as soon as one of them hands over their smartphone, he runs off, leaving the team in shock.

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Mafia members in the Italian city of Naples have reportedly threatened ambulance crews to stop using sirens as, the noise is too similar to that of police sirens, and interferes with “business”.

Ambulance drivers and first responders in Naples have recently started asking for police escorts, after numerous reports of armed mafia crews threatening and even assaulting ambulances, over their use of sirens and light signals. Apparently, these emergency signals used by ambulances are very bad for business, as they disturb drug-pushers and scare away customers, both of which often mistake them for police. Such cases have been reported for years, but the problems has intensified recently, due to the Covid-19 crisis.

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An Indian man who was under the impression that he and his family were being harassed and extorted by a group of sophisticated, ruthless hackers learned that the perpetrator was his underaged son.

Last month, Indian media reported the case of a desperate man from Ghaziabad who had approached local police about an extortion scheme that he and his family had fallen victims to. Rajiv Kumar complained that his email account had been hacked on January 1st, and that he had been receiving threats and financial demands from a group of hackers ever since. The alleged criminals were demanding Rs 10 crore (one million rupees), or they were going to release sensitive photos of Kumar to the public, and then kill him and his family.

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Mexican media has been reporting the bizarre case of a jealous and confused wife who allegedly attacked her husband with a knife after finding compromising photos of him with a younger woman in his phone. Only that woman turned out to be her.

A couple of weeks ago, several residents of the Urbi Villa neighborhood in Cajeme, Mexico’s Sonora state, called the emergency number to report a domestic disturbance involving their neighbors. Apparently, a middle-aged woman identified only as Leonora R. had attacked her husband, Juan R., with a knife, during a jealous feat over photos of him with a younger woman being intimate. The attacker had reportedly found the compromising photos while looking through the husband’s phone, and didn’t even give him a chance to explain, instead lunging at him with a knife and hurling insults.

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A 70-year-old woman from Queens, New York, was recently arrested after her husband caught her lacing his coffee with boric acid.

Robert Baron first noticed that the food his wife cooked for him tasted funny back in September 0f last year. He also started feeling sick after meals, and on some occasion he would get so tired that he slept for 15 hours at a time. Suspecting that something fishy was going on, the 63-year-old man installed a small surveillance camera in the kitchen, without telling his wife of 11 years, Suncha Tinevra. That’s how he caught his partner lacing his coffee with a chemical used to kill cockroaches.

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A young Australian woman is scared to sleep in her own home after discovering that an intruder had been living in her attic.

Monica Green, a mother-of-three from Rockhampton, Queensland, had noticed weird things around her house for a while, but she never really worried, dismissing them as coincidences or figments of her imagination. But on Monday, after coming home with her kids from a doctor’s appointment, Monica couldn’t ignore the obvious anymore. The backdoor was wide-open, the air-conditioning and the TV were on, and there was a half-eaten plate of chicken nuggets in the kitchen. She immediately called the police, and later learned that whoever had broken into her home, had probably been living there a while.

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A California man who had traveled to Chicago but was allegedly to scared by the Covid-19 pandemic to fly home, lived inside O’Hare International airport for three months without anyone noticing.

It’s unclear why Aditya Singh, a 36-year-old unemployed man traveled to Chicago in the first place, but authorities say he managed to hide in a secured area of O’Hare International Airport for three months, before he was arrested, this weekend. Singh had been living in the airport since mid October, and would have probably been there for a lot longer, had he not been approached by airport staff on Saturday and asked to produce some identification.

Singh reportedly lowered his face mask and showed the two United Airlines employees an ID badge that he was wearing around his neck. Only the badge belonged to an operations manager who had reported it missing on October 26, a week after Singh’s airplane landed at O’Hare. The police were called, and the suspicious man was taken into custody.

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Touching your girlfriend isn’t generally considered a punishable offence, but things change considerably when your date for the day is a rental.

A Taiwanese university student learned that the hard way, after getting a bit too close to a girlfriends he had rented by the hour, and getting sentenced to jail for it. In July of 2019, the boy, identified only as ‘Chen’, paid 7,200 Taiwanese dollars ($260) to rent a girlfriend for three hours, from a company called “Love Acting-Extra”. The service had very specific rules detailing what the client was allowed to to with his rented girlfriend, but also what was forbidden. Unfortunately for Chen, he got carried away, and paid a steep price for it…

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Photos of a young topless man wrapped in plastic foil and tied to a tree in Hanoi for allegedly failing to pay for his tattoos have been doing the rounds on Vietnamese social media.

It’s winter in Vietnam right now, with temperatures dropping under 10 degrees Celsius, so seeing topless men on the streets isn’t what you would call normal, especially ones wrapped tightly in plastic foil and tied to trees. And yet this was the sight some in Hanoi were treated to last week – a young shirtless man wearing a bike helmet, wrapped in see-through plastic and tied to a tree, with a sign that read “I hate paying for tattoos“. Photos of the man were posted online, and quickly went viral.

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The owner of a dark grey C-class Mercedes Benz was shocked to find it stripped down to a metal shell last week, after a gang of “professional” thieves dismantled it right in front of his house, at night.

When 56-year-old Paul Hampton, of West Bromwich, in the UK, saw his neighbor standing in front of his house early Thursday morning, he knew something was wrong, but he never imagined just how wrong. He had been out the night before, and parked his car, a £28,000 Mercedes C-class, outside their home on Marsh Lane, at around 9.30pm. At 4.30am, their neighbor was banging their door down, shouting for Paul to come out and see his car, or what was left of it…

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Colombian police recently announced the dismantlement of a Cali-based drug cartel that specialized in coercing women to get breast implants that were actually filled with liquid cocaine.

Drug trafficking organizations ae known for coming up with all sorts of ingenious methods of sending their products all over the world to minimize getting discovered at security checkpoints. You’ve surely heard of underground tunnels several kilometers long under the Mexico-US border, or of drug smuggling submarines, but did you know about the Colombian trafficking ring using women to ship drugs all the way to Europe? Aptly named “The Surgeons”, the cartel would recruit women and force them to get breast and calf implants for which they used prosthesis filled with liquid cocaine.

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An Italian woman was recently sentenced to four years in jail after she admitted to spiking a work colleague’s drink with sedatives, so she would underperform.

This disturbing story of work rivalry taken to the extreme dates back to October 6th of 2017, when Mariangela Cerrato brought a round of coffees for her colleagues at an office in Bra, a town in Italy’s Piedmont region. She brought the coffees and cappuccinos from a nearby bar, as she usually did, so no one suspected anything shady. However, after downing her cappuccino in one gulp, one of Cerrato’s colleagues, Alice Bordon, started feeling dizzy and lost her balance walking to her desk. She was taken to the hospital where doctors checked for a potential stroke, not knowing that something more insidious was at play…

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At just 23-years-old, Dr. Veeragandham Teja had already worked in 16 private hospitals, conducted several medical camps and had volunteered with Bengaluru police and local migrant workers during the pandemic. Not a bad record for any doctor, let alone a 5th grade dropout with no medical education and little training…

Veeragandham Teja had been working as a doctor for over four years when his luck finally came to an end. It was a double whammy that got him in the end: his second wife filed mental and physical harassment against him, and he made the mistake of making a recommendation to police to cancel a person’s rowdy sheet (criminal record), only to then be spotted driving that person’s registered SUV. All it took was a bit of digging and police uncovered a web of lies going back over a decade, false degrees and certificates and several aliases. Their conclusion was that Teja’s career and pretty much all of his life, for that matter, was a fabrication…

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A young Slovenian woman was recently sentenced to two years in prison for allegedly cutting off her hand with a circular saw in order to cash a $1.2 million insurance payout.

22-year-old Julija Adlesic allegedly conspired with her boyfriend and her father to commit insurance fraud in an attempt to collect $1.2 million in insurance payouts. The young Slovenian maintains that her injury was accidental, not premeditated, adding that no one in their right mind would want to become crippled at age 20, not for all the money in the world. However, prosecutors provided enough evidence that Adlesic and her co-conspirators had planned the so-called “accident” to get convictions against all of them. Julija got a 2-year prison sentence, her boyfriend, who was accused of putting her up to it, has been sentenced to three years in prison, while the woman’s father got a one year suspended sentence.

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