Saw a couple of dumb thieves in court last week. Here are their stories. Names changed because I like doing that.
1. Special Ed, former employee of a small town service station, was on trial for the theft of four bank cash-drop bags belonging to his employer. According to the evidence, he was on duty to close the station alone on a Saturday night, was picked up by friends and driven to the bank to drop the cash receipts, and pretended to do so while secreting them away. Some $7K was stolen. There was testimony from the bank to the effect that all of the gas station's cash bags were missing, and that those cash bags were the only ones missing. All signs point to . . . well, the defendant ultimately confessed.
Dumb Thief Side Note: the defense called the defendant's mother and brother and asked them if Special Ed had shown any signs of coming into a significant amount of money. New clothes? No. New stereo? No. Taking people out to dinner? No. Paying off debts? No. So what did he spend all $7000 on? According to a detective who interviewed him: "Gasoline, alcohol, and marijuana." Jeebus.
2. Timmy, a very short little man who is allegedly a furniture mover, was being sentenced on charges of, I don't know, identity theft and larceny or some such. What he did was steal $12,000. According to him, this is how he did it: He found a deposit slip in the parking lot of a bank. It had the account-holder's name and account number on it, so he took it home and puzzled over what to do with it. In the end, he decided to call the bank's phone number. As luck would have it, this account-holder had not set up a phone banking profile. So, after "about 25" tries at guessing the account's PIN, Timmy got lucky, got through, and set that up.
Now what? He has the power to transfer money anywhere. But any transfer will be traceable. How to hide his theft? First off, the account had "so much money in it" that Timmy thought the holder wouldn't even notice that $12,000 was gone. Even so, best to be safe and hide the transaction, and the surest way to hide something is to leave it in plain sight. So that's what Timmy did: he transferred $12,000 out of the victim's account and into his account AT THE SAME BANK.
Lo and behold, he was caught.
Posted by FLOG at March 18, 2005 12:34 PM