6 Normal People Who Turned Into Superheroes Out Of Nowhere

Instead, Bruce met up with the seller and made him an offer: "You can wait here for the police (...) or you can get out of here." The thief went with option B. And thus, Bike Batman was born.

The anonymous vigilante now scours Craigslist, OfferUp, and other dens of villainy for suspicious bikes, then cross-references them with ones reported stolen on Bike Index. It's a time-consuming task, since Seattle has tons of bikes, tons of drugs, and therefore tons of bike theft. Once he gets a match, he asks the seller to meet up ... which doesn't always go so well. One time, the thief recognized him from a previous incident and brought four pals, forcing Bike Batman to flee the scene. That episode probably explains why the two-wheeled crusader has started coordinating his stings with the police beforehand.

He's not alone. Snow removal worker Floyd Hall devotes four to six hours a day to snooping Facebook pages on stolen cars and digging through his tip-inundated inbox.

Once he spots a stolen car, he sends his A-Team (the "A" stands for "Anchorage") to road-block it while the police head over. That's if everything goes to plan. In 2017, Hall was shot while chasing a stolen car, which resulted in criminal charges ... for himself, due to reckless driving. If someone ever steals a police cruiser in Alaska, we've know who's not picking up the phone.

Hell, two of the mystery people we talked about in this article have since been identified thanks to them (the other is "Joseph Newton Chandler"). Can Cracked therefore take all the credit for pointing these women in the right direction? Absolutely not. That's not even sort of correct. Will Cracked therefore take all the credit for pointing these women in the right direction? Gladly, and with shameless vigor!

DNA testing confirmed the match, but Koppelman was only getting started. After helping identify five other dead bodies (and two live ones), he was asked to reconstruct a face based on nothing but some hazy photos of a skull with its jaw missing, no front teeth, and a bullet hole in the left temple. Even Koppelman didn't think he could pull that one off, but he ended up producing a sketch that authorities linked to a missing person from 1974. Thanks to Koppelman and his Corel skills, this murder investigation now has more to go on than just "Yep, she's dead, alright."

When Gonzalez informed GoFundMe about the situation, they responded by doing fuck all about it. So she took it upon herself to start GoFraudMe, a site that tracks crowdfunding scams. How does she determine which stories are fake? She says there's no simple formula, but sometimes it's as easy as Google image searching a campaign's photos and finding out that you're actually looking at a Swedish stock photo model.

Gonzalez isn't the only one doing this. In 2012, Taryn Wright's Facebook feed was inundated with the sad story of Dana Dirr, a gifted surgeon who died in a car crash right after giving birth to her 11th child ... on Mother's Day. Also, one of her sons, nine-year-old "Warrior" Eli, was fighting his fourth battle with cancer. Sure seems like a lot of tragedy for one family outside of a soap opera, but come on, the Dirrs had a long, dramatic history stretching back to the early 2000s. It couldn't all be fake, right?

As Wright soon determined, it could! Family photos had been stolen from a South African blog, and there was no record of Dana Dirr in the hospital where she "worked." Wright set up the Warrior Eli Hoax blog to out the 22-year-old medical student who had been faking the Dirr saga since she was a preteen, because it's really hard to get people to read your fanfiction, guys. Since then, Wright has exposed many other shameless scammers ... and befriended them out of serious concern for their mental health, because she's a way better person than us.

Morantz survived, barely, but Synanon's founder was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and the cult collapsed, so it was all worth it. The snakebite left him with lifelong medical problems (he's currently housebound, and says his death will set a record for the longest murder). But if anything, this only gave Morantz more of a hate-boner against cults.

He ran the class-action lawsuit that put the sickening Center for Feeling Therapy out of business, organized the campaign that stopped the LAPD from being trained by the bizarre group known as est, and even fought early cases against Scientology. That's numerous major cults and a hobo-kidnapping conspiracy, all foiled by a guy who really only wanted to write and surf. By contrast, when we set out to write and surf, we barely manage to write, and certainly don't manage to surf. How does one just stumble onto justice?

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