Surely Blauvelt had the common sense to make sure "his" new bachelor pad belonged to, say, an eccentric billionaire who owns a hundred houses and never visits them?

Nope! His lovingly crafted lie lasted for one goddamn hour. The actual owner of the place bumped in while Blauvelt's in-laws were still arguing over bedrooms, gave them one look, and called the cops.

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But not before the squatters ate all the food and licked all the silverware.

Going from a rich, charitable mansion owner to a lying felon in one fell swoop is a big nut shot for anyone. However, Blauvelt's problems were just beginning: It turns out that the reason he assumed that his girlfriend would be impressed by a large-scale re-enactment of "playing house" was that she was still pretty much at an appropriate age. The cherry on this whole stupidity cake was that the lady of Blauvelt's dreams was only 15.

When the police turned up, Blauvelt's feet didn't touch the ground. He was arrested and charged with sexual misconduct and endangering the welfare of a child, along with many interesting burglary-related things. His girlfriend and her family faced no repercussions, because apparently there are no laws against being incredibly gullible.

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Even though that would be a remarkably effective way to stop 419 scammers.

Blauvelt may have lacked in expensive mansions and the common sense to stay the hell away from minors, but his pure, stupid tenacity was world championship material: Until the end, he tried to convince the police that he had inherited the place from his dead grandfather. You know, despite having broken in and being unable to provide any paperwork, and with the real owner of the place having called the cops in the first place.

There is a very specific type of person who aspires to be the Badass, yet always ends up as the Punchline. He's the guy who can't hike through a jungle without getting into a boxing match with a silverback gorilla, and then, once he wakes up, he immediately gets arrested for harassing wildlife. We're not explicitly saying that Michael Santos is one of these people, but, you know, there's a reason a man like that turns up in a Cracked article.

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Next to that goatee, abusing endangered animals doesn't seem like much of a crime.

For instance, in 2007, Santos drove his girlfriend to an airport to show her how to fly a plane. Things were already well on their way down the path of catastrophe: Not only was Santos driving drunk, but he didn't even have a driver's license (he had a lifetime ban from driving because of, yes, drunk driving). Still, Santos was certain that his inebriation wouldn't affect his plane-flying capability -- after all, he had none. Santos didn't own a plane and was, all things considered, pretty much the exact opposite of a qualified pilot.

Santos wasn't about to let these facts interfere with his plan to show his girlfriend how he could fly through the air like the player he clearly was, perhaps as a lead-in to an offhand suggestion re: the Mile High Club. So Santos broke into the first plane he saw and managed to start its engine. The happy couple drove the plane around for a while on the ground. Santos was just trying to figure out how to take off and heading down the taxiway when the left engine suddenly (and, considering what might have happened if they actually had managed to take off, thankfully) burst into flames.

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"Uncontrolled fire gives you another 25 horsepower!"

Santos had enough sense to power down the engines before the whole plane exploded, and their romantic cruise in the sky took a different destination in the form of a nearby bean field, where the plane stuck. Presumably that marked the end of the date as well.

It took authorities several months to track down Santos, and in the end they only caught him because someone overheard him bragging about having stolen a plane once. Santos was charged with felony theft, criminal mischief, and being a habitual traffic offender, his grand total amounting to four years of prison.

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"Objection! The girl had awesome boobs!"
"Sustained."

Damages to the aircraft, by the way, were estimated at a cool $160,000. Don't drink and fly, kids!

Holy shit! If you look closely, there's a man behind all those Christmas ornaments. And that man is a filthy liar. As you can guess, there is simply no way one man could have earned all of them unless he was Rambo: According to his chest display, Day had been recognized for acts of bravery in theaters ranging from the Gulf War to World War II, and he had served the top secret SAS forces with enough merit to receive a bunch of their badges. It took the public roughly 0.05 seconds to realize that this jingling apparition was a bullshitter of the highest order, and since wearing medals in order to deceive happens to be against the law, he was awesomely arrested straight from the parade line.

Day hilariously attempted to maintain his war hero story for a while, but a court soon forced him to admit that he'd made it all up in order to impress his wife. And although history doesn't tell us how things turned out for them, we're guessing Day's passive-aggressive claim that he only did it "because his wife needed a hero in her life" at least led to a few years of sleeping on the couch.

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"... and you aren't welcome back in the bed until you've drop-kicked either three terrorists or one Nazi."

Siegel got a friend to dress in black and hide in the woods, waiting for him and his date to walk past. When they did, the friend jumped out and pretended to attack them with a knife.

However, Siegel's elaborate scheme relied entirely on the assumption that all women are Bond girls and therefore react to danger by shrieking and waiting for rescue. He got his value system updated in a hurry: The second the fake attacker emerged, Siegel's date promptly demonstrated the most effective self-defense system in existence: She ran away and called the police, leaving his sorry ass behind.

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"No! Wait! I was just about to scissor-kick him in the groin!"

This put a slight wrinkle in Siegel's plan: The whole point was that she could swoon over his decisive action in the face of danger instead of, you know, displaying some of her own. Not to be deterred by a mere complete failure, Siegel decided to give fake heroics one more go: He waited for the cops and presented them with a made-up story, where he was "slashed" three times by the knife-wielding maniac before he kung fu'd the attacker's ass, driving him off. He had even attempted to scrape himself to simulate knife wounds.

The detective who interviewed Siegel immediately noticed that he was surprisingly nervous for someone who routinely spin-kicks armed attackers. When questioned about this, Siegel eventually folded and told the truth about what happened. When his date was asked about the incident, she described his actions as "not very heroic," presumably right before calling every single woman in the state and pre-emptively destroying Siegel's chances of ever getting a date again.

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"I mean, I didn't see it personally, but with that much insecurity, how big could it be?"

And the friend who played the mugger? Although he managed to escape without getting caught, we're betting he had the worst few hours of his life: Between the "attack" and Siegel's eventual confession, the police combed the area with K-9 units. That, dear readers, is what happens when you play the wingman for an idiot.

When a man is worried that his wife is going to leave him, he's facing several tough choices. Should he attempt to talk things over and fix things? Should he embrace the situation and start converting the house into an illustrious man cave? Or should he, like Howard Walmsley, convince the whole world that he's won the lottery and embark on a life of crime?

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D. All of the above

Walmsley's reaction to a potential marriage crisis was to tell his wife that he had won 8.9 million pounds (U.S. $13.5 million) in the lottery, despite in reality having won precisely jack shit. Of course, he was perfectly aware that his "buy her love with nonexistent money" stratagem was a short-term solution at best. That's why he proceeded to convince several banks about that same goddamn lottery win and use his fake winnings as collateral to take out real loans "while the lottery people sorted out his winnings."

Not yet satisfied by the size of his personal Mount Bullshit, Walmsley also convinced a car firm to let him drive their Jaguars and an architect to draw up plans for expansions to his house (the plans, naturally, included a swimming pool and gymnasium). The house, by the way, was a $460,000 farmhouse that he bought so hard, its previous owners wound up temporarily living in a trailer.

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"Who do I make this giant briefcase of cash out to?"

He did all of the above armed with nothing but a silver tongue and empty promises of funds that never were. His bullshitting became so habitual that he even conned his own friends out of thousands of dollars. Still, it looked like Walmsley was winning: His apparent new wealth had rekindled the couple's love, thus completing his prime objective of saving his marriage.

That is, until he was caught. His inevitable fall from the heights of financial power came less than two years later, when the police knocked on his door in the early morning to haul him off to jail. The widely publicized case saw the judge ripping Walmsley a new asshole and gleefully handing him a three-year jail sentence. He was now broke, imprisoned, and publicly shamed, and the worst thing is that he could only watch as his beloved wife, whom he had misled all this time, was gearing up to leave his sorry ass once and for all ... except that she didn't. She totally stayed by his side.

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"And I better never hear a goddamn peep about how many Real Housewives episodes are on the DVR."

Love comes in many forms, and the fact that Walmsley's just happened to turn him into a rampant conning dickhead did nothing to deter his wife. She said that in her eyes, he had done nothing wrong, since he only did it to keep them together.

So ... success?

For more ridiculous fibbers, check out The 6 Most Impressive Resume Liars and The 5 Most Ridiculous Lies Ever Published as Non-Fiction.