A 42-year-old Florida man managed to dupe dealership staff into letting him drive off in a $140,000 Porsche 911 in exchange for a fake check he had printed on his home computer.

Casey William Kelley walked into a Porsche dealership in Destin, Okaloosa County on July 27 and managed to drive off with a brand new, white Porsche 911 sports car. The really impressive thing about that is he only traded a useless piece of paper for it. Kelley had reportedly printed the check for $139,203.05 on his home printer, but staff let him take the car without waiting to see if the check cleared. They must have fallen for the conman’s confident attitude, as he was so proud of himself that he even asked staff to take a picture of him with the car before driving away.

Read More »

A 51-year-old Ukrainian woman was recently arrested after it was discovered that she had been digging an underground tunnel near the walls of a prison, with the intention of helping her convicted son to escape.

The unnamed woman reportedly hails from the Ukrainian city of Nikolaev and had rented a house near the prison where her son was serving a life sentence for murder. Every night, she drove a silent electric scooter to an empty field near the Zaporizhia maximum security prison and used rudimentary tools to dig a 10-foot-deep tunnel toward the penal colony. She worked only during the night, using an improvised trolley to take the dirt out of the narrow tunnel. She had been working for at least three weeks and had almost reached the prison walls when she was discovered and arrested.

Read More »

A Vietnamese man obsessed with traditional porcelain dishes and antiques has spent the last 25 years of his life decorating his house with almost 10,000 porcelain bowls, plates and urns.

Nguien Van Truong first fell in love with porcelain antiques in 1986, a year after being discharged from the army and returning to his home village of Kieu Son, in Vietnam’s Vinh Phuc province. He was making a living as a carpenter at a time and got the chance to paint the table and chairs of a local antique collector who first introduced him to the beauty of traditional porcelain dishes. Truong was so impressed that he decided to become a collector himself, and scoured all of Vietnam’s northern provinces in search of traditional porcelain objects, and spent all of his money trying to acquire as much of it as possible.

Read More »

Daisugi is a centuries-old forestry technique developed in Japan as a way of cultivating the highly-prized Kitayama Cedar without actually using any land. Today, the visually-striking technique can be witnessed in ornamental gardens.

Dating back to the 14th century, daisugi allowed for the cultivation of Kitayama cedar, a species of tree known for growing exceptionally straight and lacking knots, in a time when high demand and lack of straight land for planting enough trees made growing Kitayama cedars impossible. Similar to the famous art of bonsai, daisugi basically involved heavily pruning a so-called “mother cedar tree” so that only the straightest shoots are allowed to grow. Careful hand-pruning is conducted every couple years, leaving only the top boughs and ensuring that the shoots remain knot free. After about 20 years, the now massive shoots can either be harvested as exceptional Kitayama lumber, or replanted to repopulate forests.

Read More »

Su ‘Moh Moh’ Naing, a 23-year-old girl from Myanmar shot to online fame earlier this week after being featured by a popular English tabloid for having an incredibly thin waist.

The Burmese student claims to have a waist circumference of only 13.7 inches, which would make it one of the tiniest waists in the world, but even more shocking is the fact that Naing insist her waist size is only linked to genetics. Despite being accused of digitally editing the photos she posts on her Instagram, and even of having some of her ribs removed or constantly wearing a tight corset to achieve such a tiny figure, Su Naing says she is all natural.

Read More »

James Maina Mwangi believes himself to be the smartest looking man in all of Africa, maybe even the world, and looking at his impeccably stylish outfits, it’s hard to disagree.

When he came to Nairobi, in Kenya, James Maina Mwangi had only one shirt and people laughed at him because they knew his father, who was an honorable but poor freedom fighter. He asked God for something to make himself stand out, and he apparently got this flamboyant fashion style. He’s been using his brightly colored suits and accessories to stand out on the streets of the Kenyan capital ever since, and has even attracted international attention thanks to his outfits.

Read More »

Villages on the east coast of the Kamchatka peninsula, in the Russian Far-East are experiencing scenes that seem taken out of an Alfred Hitchkok movie. Only instead of birds invading their community, it’s billions of mosquitoes swirling into visible “tornadoes”.

Villages like Ust-Kamchatsk are used to being invaded by large number of mosquitoes every summer, it’s normal for this insects to swarm near bodies of water, but this year it’s much worse than usual. Because of an unusually hot summer, the number of mosquitoes is much larger, making them an even bigger nuisance than they usually are. Window and door nets do little to keep the pesky buzzers out of people’s homes, as they seem to get in through the smallest of cracks, and going outside means dealing with large swarms of mosquitoes that seem to reach the sky when seen from afar.

Read More »

Sports are usually associated with skill and effort, be they physical or mental, but in Vinkensport or vinkenzetting (literally ‘Finch Sitting), a traditional animal sport practiced in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders, it’s all about sitting down and listening to birds singing.

In Vinkensport, small cages are lined up in a row about six feet apart on the street. Inside each box is a single male chaffinch whose job is to produce as many bird calls as possible in one hour. Sitting in front of the wooden cages are their owners, the vinkeniers (“finchers”) who tally the bird songs with chalk on a large wooden rod. Each chalk line represents one complete bird call which ends in a characteristic flourish known as a susk-e-wiet. Judges walk along the row of cages to make sure no one cheats. The chaffinch with the most bird calls in an hour is declared the winner. Vinkensport is a very passive sport, some would even call it boring, but it is also a very controversial one.

Read More »

The Gate Tower Building is one of the many several tall office buildings that make up Osaka’s impressive skyline, but there is something about it that makes it unique in the world – it has a functional highway going right through it.

Photos of this architectural anomaly have been doing the rounds on social media for over two decades now, and it’s easy to see why. 16-storey buildings don’t usually have highway off-ramps going right through them, but the Gate Tower Building does, and the traffic doesn’t affect the people working inside it one bit. The elevators are located on the side of the building, and the highway itself doesn’t touch the tower, which is properly insulated against traffic noise and vibrations anyway. It’s still quite a sight to behold, and if you’re ever in Osaka you should definitely pass by, or rather, through.

Read More »

A Russian man is taking a bank to court for forcing him to pay interest on a loan he never asked for, after fraudsters used his stolen smartphone to take out the pre-approved loan in his name.

Vladimir Volokhovich, from Moscow, has been making news headlines in his home country of Russia after finding himself right in the middle of an unusual scandal. Volokhovich is being asked by the Russian branch of Alpha Bank to pay up a pre-approved loan taken up by fraudsters in his name, using his stolen mobile phone. Not only did the scammers manage to transfer part of the funds to their accounts, but the interest on the loan Vladimir never asked for is adding up every day. The bank, however, refuses to cancel the loan, claiming that Vladimir should have reported his smartphone as stolen sooner.

Read More »

Doctors at KU Leuven University in Belgium recently reported the bizarre case of a 54-year-old woman who was convinced she was a chicken and temporarily behaved like one.

The married woman, whose name was not revealed, reportedly had a stable job at a pharmacy and had no history of drug or alcohol abuse before the strange episode. One day, her brother stopped by and found her clucking, blowing her cheeks and crowing like a rooster. Not knowing what to do, the woman’s brother took her to a nearby hospital, where the 54-year-old told doctors she thought she was a chicken and described feeling a new sensation in her legs.

Read More »

An Australian mother-of-three made international news headlines this week after she became the target of an original prank thought up by her ex boyfriend for dumping her.

When it comes to getting back at your ex-partner after being dumped, it just doesn’t get more original than advertising a Chewbacca roar contest and encouraging total strangers to call your ex’s number and leave their impression of the furry Star Wars character as voice messages. That’s exactly what one Cairns man did earlier this week, after being dumped. He put up portraits with the fake Chewbacca roar contest featuring his ex’s phone number and promising a $100 prize to the best Chewbacca.

Read More »

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to get hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, staring absently into the camera might actually be a good idea.

At least that’s what Indonesian youtuber Muhammad Didit did earlier this month, posting a 2-hour-long clip of himself sitting on a couch and doing nothing but staring into the camera. The video has since received nearly 1.5 million views and has inspired countless memes on Indonesian social media. In fact, ever since Didit’s video went viral, other would-be internet celebrities have been been busy imitating him, hoping to also copy his success. You can now find YouTube videos of people doing nothing for four, five and even eight hours at a time.

Read More »

Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, a.k.a. “El Mencho”, the leader of Mexico’s fastest-growing drug cartel, has allegedly built his own private hospital in order to avoid having to treat his illnesses at other, less secure healthcare facilities.

El Mencho, under whose leadership the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel (CJNG) became the most prominent criminal organization in Mexico, reportedly suffers from kidney failure and other serious illnesses that require constant medical care. Unlike most drug kingpins, who usually keep doctors on their payrolls in order to avoid going to hospitals where they could be arrested or killed by police, El Mencho decided to go one step further. Because his serious kidney condition means he can’t have it treated in one of his many mountain hideouts across Jalisco, he allegedly decided to build his own hospital.

Read More »

An Indian software engineer was arrested last week after reportedly hacking his former employer and deleting information in the hopes that he would be rehired.

The IT specialist, identified as one Vikesh Sharma, used to work as a senior software engineer in the company until being fired during the the lockdown due to disagreement over his salary. Only instead of moving on and looking for another job, Sharma allegedly tried to get his old job back in a very unusual way. He managed to hack his former employer’s database and delete thousands of patient details, in the hopes that his former boss would contact him to rectify the situation. That didn’t happen…

Read More »