Stupid Cons That Actually Worked For A While

3 A Man Complaining About Bread Racked Up A Quarter Million Dollars

In 2015, Takashi Ishimoto called a Tokyo grocery store to complain that the bread he purchased was soggy. So far this is just the story of a 53-year-old man getting ready for his retirement hobbies, but the next day he called and pretended to be a bigshot at the store's head office. Furious that word of the store's infamous soggy bread was spreading, employees were ordered to apologise to Ishimoto by delivering him fresh bread... and cold, hard cash.

Ishimoto somehow sounded confident enough to bilk a store for $2,500. Oh, and upon his eventual arrest, he was linked to a series of scams from previous years that used the same tactic to bring in around a quarter million dollars. Such a wacky scheme could have only worked in Japan, because American retailers would have made him wait on hold for five hours, then told him it wasn't their fault he didn't buy the store's $129.99 annual bread insurance.

2 A Terrible Musician With No Fans Conned His Way Into A European Tour

Every teenager dreams of being a rock star, and every tone deaf 29-year-old who can't accept that they're going to be stuck working in an insurance office for the next 35 years will go to desperate lengths to keep the dream alive. So when Jered Eames, aka Threatin, booked a 10-city European tour, it looked like he finally got his big break. Then, at his London show, three people showed up to a venue built for 300. Because that's about how many fans Threatin really has.

1 A Change Of Address Form Relocated UPS Headquarters To A Small Apartment

In 2018, the United States Postal Service received a change-of-address form from UPS, the multi-billion dollar international delivery and logistics company. Apparently UPS had decided to relocate their global headquarters from a sprawling Atlanta office complex to a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago. Hey, times are tough. We hear FedEx is run from a single WeWork desk and eBay is just an old van parked under a bridge. Half the Fortune 500 went bankrupt after a Sheboygan McDonald's secured their Wi-Fi.

Okay, in reality, the form had been filed by Chicago grifter Dushaun Henderson-Spruce and, amazingly, it worked. USPS, apparently still run on the honor system by a kindly old postmaster, accepted the change and redirected UPS's corporate mail to Henderson-Spruce's shitty bachelor pad. Even crazier, it took UPS three months to notice, during which executives presumably stared wistfully out the window and wondered why no one ever wrote to them anymore. Meanwhile, every postal worker in Chicago lost their knee cartilage hauling letters to Henderson-Spruce. When the cops finally arrived, they found over 3,000 letters crammed into his tiny apartment. The guy was getting so much mail the post office actually left a special mail tub outside his door because his box couldn't hold it all. At some point USPS must have thought they were getting pranked by Purolator, because the daily Miracle on 34 Street re-enactments had to have raised some questions.

It cannot be emphasized enough how little work Henderson-Spruce did. His entire scam was filling in a form. And he fucked that up by writing his own initials on the signature line before scratching them out and writing in "UPS." That kind of laziness does not make you proactive about avoiding arrest, and Henderson-Spruce was charged with depositing over $58,000 in UPS checks. He also managed to get American Express to send 150 UPS corporate credit cards to his address, although most arrived after his arrest so he never go the chance to make it rain at his local Chili's. He pled guilty to mail fraud in February 2019. Meanwhile, UPS has yet to build an advertising campaign around the scam, which is crazy because "UPS: Unlike The Government, We Won't Redirect All Your Important Mail To Any Rando Who Asks" is a hell of a slogan.

E. Reid Ross has a couple books, Nature is the Worst: 500 reasons you'll never want to go outside again and Canadabis: The Canadian Weed Reader, both available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.