7 Criminals Who Made Getting Caught Look Easy

His excuses were being high on meth and wanting to spend one last day with his wife and child, which means he's either the world's worst father or its greatest multitasker.

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"DAAAAAAAD, I don't WANNA play 'stare to keep the invisible spiders away' anymore."

When someone calls in school bomb threats as decoys from his real objective, he's meant to lead an army of Europeans to rob the Federal Reserve Bank of New York while distracting John McClane. He's not meant to be crashing at his mother-in-law's house. Yes, he called in mass-child-murder-level terrorist threats from his mother-in-law's house. No, we don't think that's even in the top 10 reasons why she probably hates him.

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"Actually, this is the only way he's screwed my daughter, which means he hangs around less!"

You couldn't publicly ruin your life, criminal record, and karma harder if you kicked the pope off that balcony onto the visiting Dalai Lama. Mines told local papers that he only called the schools because the courthouse didn't take him seriously, which has to be the most optimistic amelioration in history. When you've already admitted to threatening to bomb the place in charge of sentencing your ass for shit like that, you don't haggle about the purity of your intentions in involving two schools. And when your best hope is convincing people that you used two buildings full of innocent schoolchildren as terrorist voice mail, just give up.

Stupidity could only have dumped him back in the police station faster if they'd made him leave through a revolving door. The front door of a police station is the most arrestable location in the world. At this point the security cameras weren't a 1984 nightmare but a genuine labor-saving device, as well as providing vital evidence, not for the prosecution, but for everyone, because otherwise no one would believe anyone could be so stupid.

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"Hell, we don't believe it, and we see the sort of thing office workers look up when everyone else has gone home."

It's a tragic misuse of municipal art. Graffiti can be a powerful force for reclaiming public spaces, a reaction against the insane idea that shampoo corporations are allowed to decorate where we live while we aren't. And "Copulate Tha Cops" is the number two theme of all graffiti (just below the artist proving that he can spell his own name), one you can write almost anywhere and meet with widespread agreement. But that "almost" means "not directly on the most visible surface of a police station." We're talking about a criminal so stupid that they didn't even need one-way glass to catch him in the act. Regular glass was more than confusing enough for him to incriminate himself in full public view.

Even if he'd gotten away with it, we don't see how he imagined getting far. Maybe he thought caller ID is legally binding, so that when the judge hauled back the admitted phone thief in the Case of the Thieved Phone, he could call the courtroom and order his own release.

The Mason sheriff's office released the world's worst fraudster pending further charges, safe in the knowledge that if he tried to flee the state, he'd probably do so by dressing as a bag of evidence and hiding in the back of a highway patrol car. Or by dressing in a suit composed entirely of question marks and going back to attacking Batman.

We can only assume that Bennett was an advanced pick-up artist trying out an experimental new form of super-negging and meeting with the same level of success all such douchebaggery deserves. We can say he was dedicated, because he was still outside the house when police arrived to arrest him. And that, Hollywood writers, is what really happens when someone's entire romantic strategy is totally dedicating themselves to a woman no matter what reality and sanity might say about it.

Returning to claim the love of the one you've already stolen from only works when you're a Greek myth, and trying it in the real world leads to similar levels of disbelief that you're real.

He found her home phone number, explained the situation to her father, and demanded his money back. This phone call had to simultaneously be both the greatest nightmare and the greatest relief in a father's life. Yes, a creepy Internet man is trying to have sex with your daughter, but he's an idiot. This resulted in a state known as "SO arrested," which tells us that the father's chainsaw must have been in the shop that week.

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"They laughed when I bought this for her first birthday."

The man claimed that he thought the girl was much older. So he normally calls the parents of his dates to complain when things don't work out? That would explain why he's still being stood up for dates he already paid for at 57.

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"Yes, it's me again. No, I don't know why people don't like it when I use my phone."

Of course he was easily caught and fined by a Swedish court. Wait, fined? That's it? Damn, Sweden, the guy trying to have sex with a child and then demanding his money back is not the time to try out ironic punishments. Or if it is, "illegally demanding a refund" is not the crime you're meant to be ironically punishing.

That is the most obvious and scumbaggy crime possible. If you build a machine that can't detect bombs, that is going to become terrifyingly clear to some poor bastard, and his surviving colleagues are going to be very upset. And have more of your empty boxes left to examine. Hell, they'll even be able to see the empty void inside the first one when it's been blown open. Was his plan to have every single user of the device exploded so that they couldn't press charges?

The judge said Bolton had damaged the reputation of British trade abroad. If you're selling fake bomb detectors and the only thing you damage is a reputation, that's the only reason you're being sentenced by a court instead of a crowd of amputees using their remaining limbs to loft burning torches and a scaffold. That may still happen when the various global security agencies he just tried to mass-manslaughter find out that he's only been jailed for seven years. That's a shorter sentence than some marijuana dealers receive, and that stuff prevents people from going out and getting bombed.

Luke has a website, tumbles, and responds to every single tweet.

Adulate more admirable figures with Who's the Man? Superman vs. He-Man, or avoid assholery yourself with 5 Nerd Hacks That Make You Less of a Jerk.

Enjoy more idiotic criminal capers with The 9 Most Hilarious Ways Criminals Were Caught or more effective felons with 7 Wanted Criminals Who Made Mocking the Police into an Art Form.

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