Dumb Criminal Posts Facebook Photo Wearing The Dress She Stole Earlier That Day, Is Summarily Arrested

Stupidity

from the dress-to-impress dept

At some point, it might become useful for Facebook to release some data on exactly how many dumb criminals have been brought to justice via some aspect of the social media giant. For reasons I can’t fathom, it seems like we see this all the time. Criminals share the police station’s status update implicating themselves. Fraternities vomit their crimes all over their Facebook pages. Fugitives from the law occasionally post pictures from their vacations, alerting police to their exact whereabouts. It’s a brave and utterly stupid new world out there for criminals and they’re just not handling it well.

The latest example is Danielle Saxton, who thought it was a good idea to steal a distinctive leopard-print dress (very tasteful) from a clothing boutique and then post pictures of herself wearing the stolen property to Facebook mere hours later.

Police say 27-year-old Danielle Saxton stole from a downtown boutique last week. Then, she posted pictures of herself wearing the merchandise. Investigators say Saxton shared the pics just a few hours after the theft. The images quickly spread on Facebook, and led officers straight to her. Police say the pictures are evidence of shoplifting committed by Saxton. The theft happened at Mortie’s Boutique in West Frankfort, where multiple items disappeared last Friday.

It takes a special brand of hubris to put stolen property on display in this manner. Why not just steal the Hope Diamond and dangle it from your ear like the world’s most obnoxious earing? The shop’s owner, Kert Williams, had security cameras on the premises and posted about the theft on the shop’s own social media page. The enterprising, facebook-ing public did a Perry Mason and alerted the authorities, who picked Saxton up for theft. An arrest she feels is grossly unjust, mind you, with some rather impressive reasoning.

“Her excuse was there was nobody in here. We were in the back working, and that she could just take it. You know, not really much of an excuse there,” Williams told News 3.

Well, no, it isn’t much of an excuse, but we’re not dealing with Carl Sagan here, if you take my meaning. Enjoy those court dates, Danielle. Try not to wear any stolen merchandise to the courthouse, mmkay?

Filed Under: criminals, social media, stealing

DC Cops Learn From FBI: Regularly Invent Crimes To Arrest 'Possible Future' Criminals

Legal Issues

from the minority-report dept

As we recently discussed, it’s becoming readily apparent that the FBI’s most vaunted counter-terrorism wins are almost all stings for “crimes” they made up all by themselves and then coerced others to join. Even for those that don’t have a problem with this kind of practice in theory, it has to be jarring to learn just how many of these “terrorists” are either suffering serious mental or social illnesses or have had their confessions beaten out of them. By all appearances, it looks pretty clear that the FBI is bumping up their “win” statistics on the backs of these highly questionable stings.

So of course local law enforcement is getting in on the action as well. Take the police in Washington D.C., for instance, who are featured in a Washington Post story detailing how they invent armed robbery plans whole-cloth and then recruit civilians to join up shortly before arresting these future-criminals. Some of the plots the police of devised are quite detailed and terrifying, involving robbing liquor stores and targets that are supposedly drug dealers. After discussing the plans with an undercover cop, everyone is then arrested and charged with a variety of “conspiracy to commit” charges. According to some experts, the government is on firm legal ground with regards to entrapment.

The government is on solid legal ground, experts say, when it comes to fending off allegations that suspects were set up — or entrapped — by the police. Even if the government entices the defendant, the target has to show that he was not predisposed to commit the crime.

Sure, and if you’re a defendant in one of these cases, good luck convincing anyone that you didn’t have a predisposition for the crime you were tricked into thinking you were going to commit. Again, it’s easy to opine that these are bad people, but that doesn’t take into account mental illness and pressure applied by undercover officers eager to bolster their arrest statistics. According to reports, that kind of pressure included giving minors alcohol and/or taking them to strip clubs, because nobody has ever made themselves out to be something they’re not when drunk or in the presence of naked members of the opposite sex. The question becomes whether anything like the made up crime would have ever happened had it not been first invented by the police.

“When you have the government offering guns or the getaway car and making it really attractive, you have to ask: Is this an opportunity that would have really come around in real life? Would this person have been able to put together this type of crime without government assistance?” said Katharine Tinto, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York who has studied undercover policing tactics.

It’s even worse when the police engineer aspects of the made up crimes in the sting in order to manufacture longer sentences for the would-be criminals they ensnare.

Tinto and others also take issue with the government’s ability to essentially engineer tough penalties by controlling the details of the made-up crime. Part of the reason the District cases have been so successful, according to defense lawyers, is that the potential jail time for the federal conspiracy charge is steep enough that many defendants are more inclined to make a deal with prosecutors than risk losing at trial.

The global problem in all of this is the aim: this is all about bolstering crime-fighting statistics rather than responding to any actual crimes or criminals. Will the police likely get some violent criminals off the streets with this tactic? Sure, but so could actual police work and, as I indicated, that isn’t what this is all about. On top of that, the questions raised by the tactic are serious and some of the people caught up in all this probably aren’t benefited most by engineered jail time. Add to all that questions about who the police are generally going to look towards as targets of this kind of sting operation (gasp, minorities), and we should be left wondering why they aren’t fighting the crime that exists rather than making up crime that otherwise wouldn’t.

Filed Under: criminals, entrapment, fbi, own plots, police, stings, washington dc

Pro Tip: If You're Going To Break And Enter Someone's Home, Don't Log Into Your Facebook

Stupidity

from the feeling-stupid dept

In the history of the dumb criminals we’ve written about, it’s been quite difficult to stave off the temptation to label each and every one of them “the dumbest criminal.” This should be understandable to anyone who has read these stories, what with all the self-incrimination, Google-searching for tips on how to commit their crimes, and the taunting of LEOs. That said, I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced the temptation quite so strongly as I am with this knucklehead breaking into someone’s home, logging into his facebook account on the victim’s computer, and failing to log back out.

See, when James Wood returned to his Minnesota home one day, he found the house ransacked with tons of his stuff missing. In their place appeared to be only some wet clothes and shoes.

“I started to panic,” he said. “But then I noticed he had pulled up his Facebook profile.”

Wood posted to Facebook using Wig’s profile, saying Wig had burglarized his home. He even shared his phone number to see if someone would call with information. Wig texted him later that day.

Yeah, that seriously happened. Not only did Nicholas Wig, a 26 year old man with ostensibly enough brain-power to lift himself out of bed in the morning, leave his Facebook account logged into his victim’s computer, he actually responded to the messages Wood was inputting into his profile and contacted the phone number Wood left in hopes of catching the guy. Wood informed Wig that he’d left his clothes and shoes at his house when he was doing the world’s dumbest Ocean’s Eleven impression and offered to return them in exchange for some of the stolen items. But, I mean, come on. Nobody’s that stupid, right?

Wig agreed to meet with Wood later that night. Wood believes Wig was under the impression he would give him back some of his clothes he had left at his home in exchange for a recycled cell phone Wig had stolen. Wood, at his friend’s house, left for home. On his way back to his house he saw and recognized Wig, from his Facebook profile, walking on the street. He immediately called police.

“I’ve never seen this before,” Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom said. “It’s a pretty unusual case, might even make the late night television shows in terms of not being too bright.”

Oh. I, uh, appear to have been mistaken. Someone is that dumb and that someone’s name is Nicholas Wig. But, hey, you know, maybe this is all some kind of misunderstanding. I mean, it’s not like someone who actually stole stuff from a person would then return to the freaking scene of the crime to meet that same person, right?

Wig was wearing Wood’s watch when he found him. Police arrested him at the scene.

And just like that, a criminal defense attorney somewhere in Minnesota was handed a not-of-sound-mind defense.

Filed Under: crime, criminals, social media

Yes, Federal Agents Can Identify Anonymous Tor Users, Because Most People Don't Know How To Be Anonymous

Privacy

from the well,-duh dept

For many, many years now, we keep hearing law enforcement whine about the “threats” of anonymity and how people would be able to get away with all sorts of criminal activity if they weren’t given the ability to track, monitor and tap pretty much every communications technology that has come along. A decade ago the fear was that free and open WiFi was going to be a major boon to criminals who could use it “with no trace.” As we pointed out, however, nothing about using an anonymous connection like that means you won’t get caught, because criminals have to do a lot of things, many of which will expose them in other ways, without having to tap and track every technological interaction. What’s known as good old-fashioned detective work can often track down criminals who used tools to be anonymous — and for years, we’ve pointed out many, many, many examples of this.

More recently, law enforcement’s concern has been about Tor (which is slightly ironic, given that Tor was created and funded by the US government). The Snowden revelations have shown that, try as they might, the NSA has not had much luck in compromising Tor, and Snowden himself has noted that properly used encryption mostly works.

A recent Wall Street Journal article notes that law enforcement is slowly realizing that perhaps Tor isn’t a parade of horribles that must be encumbered with backdoors for wiretapping… after realizing that most criminals more or less reveal themselves by doing something stupid along the way anyway.

But officials are becoming more confident that Tor’s shield of anonymity isn’t impenetrable.

“There’s not a magic way to trace people [through Tor], so we typically capitalize on human error, looking for whatever clues people leave in their wake,” said James Kilpatrick, one of the HSI agents who is part of Operation Round Table, a continuing investigation into a Tor-based child-pornography site that has so far resulted in 25 arrests and the identification of more than 250 victims, all children.

This is a good thing. We should want law enforcement to be able to track down criminals — and it’s good to see that they’re figuring out ways to do so. But it’s important that they should need to do so via basic detective work, rather than by compromising important technology, creating security flaws and opening up all sorts of dangerous unintended consequences.

As with all kinds of new technologies, anonymizing technologies seem to create something of a moral panic among law enforcement types, who then insist those technologies need to be “broken” and backdoored or else criminals could somehow get away with everything. But that’s silly. Sooner or later most criminals do other things that reveal who they are, opening them up to investigation and potential indictment, arrest, trial etc.

One hopes that as this realization becomes more widespread, law enforcement and intelligence agencies will finally pull back from constantly trying to expand wiretapping laws that will break important innovations and technologies, but perhaps that’s being too optimistic.

Filed Under: anonymity, criminals, detective work, tor

Dumb Criminal Promises To Shoot Someone For 100 Retweets, Is Promptly Arrested

Stupidity

from the how's-your-foot-feel? dept

We’ve seen dumb criminals do a lot of dumb things with the technology on their fingertips, always resulting in their prompt arrest, because that’s how things turn out for dumb criminals. Whether it’s sharing the police Facebook post seeking their arrest or college kids celebrating their illegal behavior online, the idea is that for the nefarious criminal, over-sharing can get you into lots of trouble.

But for the idiot criminal who wants to set the record for being the biggest assbag, I’ll simply point to Dakkari Dijon McAnuff, who was angry enough at apparently being named after a condiment that he sent out the following tweet:

I’ll give you three guesses what happened next, but you’ll only need one.

Dakkari Dijon McAnuff, of Los Angeles, was booked Wednesday on suspicion of making criminal threats, police said. He remained in jail in lieu of $50,000 bail. The investigation began Wednesday morning when LAPD officers were notified about a photo on Twitter. The photo shows a rifle pointed at a Los Angeles street with the caption “100 [retweets] and I’ll shoot someone walking.”

I have to say, even though you’ll often find me wandering the halls of my workplace muttering under my breath about the ridiculous over-prosecution and punishment in our legal system, $50k bail seems a bit light to me. Perhaps McAnuff was joking, except that his joke wasn’t funny, it was a promise to harm people. Perhaps he thought people would realize it was an air rifle (as police later determined) and not a hunting rifle, except that really doesn’t make any damned difference. And, to my mind, the kind of person who would send this out for any reason whatsoever isn’t the kind of person I trust getting back out on the street without a severely taught lesson applied to him.

Here’s to you spending some time in jail, Mr. McAnuff. I want you to think real hard about what you’ve done, now.

Filed Under: criminals, self-incrimination

Google Is Your Friend, Unless You're A Dumb Criminal; Then It's Your Downfall

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the search-sentence-terms dept

One of the common aspects of most of the stories about dumb criminals we cover here is how they use some aspect of technology to do something tangentially stupid. Recall, for instance, the stupid fraternity that somehow thought they’d get away with going Heisenberg on their Facebook page, or when a young woman robbed a bank and then bragged about it on YouTube. But what if you had on your hands a criminal so dumb that they weren’t sure exactly what would happen once they had attempted their criminal-y exploits? Well, what is your first step these days if you want to get an answer to something?

Meet Sarah McLoud, Robert Owens, and Daniel Murphy of Boston, a group of not particularly intelligent bank robbers. These three were apparently dissatisfied with the heroin ring they were allegedly running, so they decided to rob a bank. But they didn’t know how to successfully rob a bank, evidenced further by the ease with which they were caught.

Narcotics detectives who viewed surveillance footage believed they recognized McLoud, a suspect in the ongoing investigation of a heroin ring based at 51 Torrey St., just around the corner from the bank, police said. Owens was also a suspect in that investigation. Police found McLoud and Owens at the Torrey Street address shortly after 4 p.m. and arrested them, according to the statement. Police did not disclose the arrests until Monday. Officers then secured a search warrant for McCloud’s room at Torrey Street and found the clothing she wore during the robbery, the stolen cash, and “a significant quantity of heroin packaged for sale,” police said.

Fine, so we have a drug dealing trio that apparently went to the Superman School Of Hiding In Plain Sight when it comes to concealing their identities. And, sure, perhaps keeping all of that sweet china white and the clothes they robbed the bank in out and available for police to find was stupid. But how about an extra bit of stupidity candy to really wrap this all up? Remember the question I asked you above? What would you do if you wanted to rob a bank but didn’t know much about robbing banks? You already know where this is going, don’t you?

Officers also found a computer recently used to search the phrases, “What happens if you rob a bank,” “What happens if you rob a house,” “What happens if you rob a drug dealer,” and “If you’re going to rob a bank,” police said.

Ah, delightful, because apparently all the copies of Robbing Banks For Dummies at the local library had already been checked out. So here’s a note to my idiotic criminal friends: burn your clothes, hide your heroin, and at least clear your search history from your browser after you carry out your nefarious misdeeds. Otherwise, you just look lazy.

Filed Under: criminals, search

Thief Steals Church Computer, Calls Church's Security Company So He Can Watch Porn

Failures

from the the-porn-identity dept

It’s been several weeks, so it must be time for another story of another dumb criminal. Past iterations have included murder-conspiring butt-dialers, bank robbers bragging on YouTube, and criminals taunting law enforcement on social media. However, what has been lacking in all of these stories is the real central component of the internet, that which makes it tick: porn.

We can now rectify that omission, thanks to a God-fearing parishioner from Oklahoma who stole a computer from his church and was perhaps as surprised as he was frustrated when he couldn’t watch some good old-fashioned meat-pounding on it.

An Oklahoma church employee called in a theft to cops, saying whoever stole a computer from the establishment probably attended the church or was familiar with it, because there were no signs of a break-in. He was right, but the suspect wasn’t caught while say, Googling during services. A company that had monitoring software on the computer alerted the church that someone kept trying to look up pornography on the missing computer.

Stealing a church computer to watch pornography? It’s almost enough to make one believe all is lost with the world. But never fear, this episode ends in a much more stupid fashion than suggested above. The church had a contract with an IT security firm, which monitored use of the machine and blocked inappropriate websites. Still, simply knowing what kind of porn someone is into isn’t enough to identify them (thankfully), so police weren’t able to do much with the information.

Fortunately, our idiot thief was feeling as helpful as he was horny.

Police couldn’t really make a bust until said suspect contacted the software company itself, asking it to take down the monitoring software, ostensibly because he didn’t want anyone watching while he surfed for porn. Police arrested the man, saying he denied taking the computer despite the fact that it was allegedly found in his home, but that he later confessed.

Here’s a tip for all you cathedral criminals out there: wiping a computer back to factory settings is way easier than explaining exactly how stupid you’d have to be to call the IT security company whose software is on the computer you stole just so you could wank off to material you could probably just as easily get on your phone.

Filed Under: computers, criminals, porn

Worst Woman In The World Burns Dog Alive, Is Caught After Bragging About It On Facebook

Failures

from the i-hate-you dept

Normally when we write up posts discussing idiot criminals and their internet exploits, they’re a bit of levity in an otherwise maddening world. Whether they’re taunting law enformcement or posting pictures of the meals they’re eating with the feds, their stupidity is typically enjoyable. This is not one of those stories. Instead, this is a story about a stupid criminal who may well be the worst woman currently in existence.

Adrienne Martin was apparently taking care of her sister-in-law’s dog. Claiming the dog had acted aggressively, she chained the animal in the backyard and lit it on fire. The dog died shortly after it was found and taken to a stray rescue. Then Martin did what any psychopath would do: bragged about it on Facebook.

Martin, who has been charged with felony animal abuse, reportedly said on Facebook, “I’m on killa mode… kill dogs… today. I mean what I say and I say what I mean… all dogs don’t go to heaven.”


Martin is the kind of person that makes people hope there’s a Hell to which she may eventually retire. The cruelty is obviously astounding as is her depraved commentary on her social media page. Thankfully, those investigating her crime were tipped to her comments and she’s been arrested and charged with two felonies.

So, while I typically mock dumb criminals for posting about their exploits, I want to thank Ms. Martin for doing so in this case. Any action that expedites the stripping of your freedom is good in my book.

Filed Under: criminals, dogs, social media

Woman Who Bragged That She Was 'The Queen Of Tax Fraud' On Facebook Gets 21 Years In Jail

Failures

from the seriously,-stop-breeding dept

The stupid never seems to stop when it comes to dumb criminals. Whether it’s accidentally dialing 911 during their murder-plotting or jumping on YouTube to make sure grandma knows what a great little bank-robber you are, there’s just something about these criminals that make them go internet stupid. How else could you explain when these guys bilk money out of companies and governments, then jump on Twitter to taunt the authorities? Criminals, by and large, are stupid.

Well, let’s put another one up on our wall of jack-ass-ery, shall we? Meet Rashia Wilson of Tampa, Florida. Rashia is the self-proclaimed “queen of IRS tax fraud.” And she self-proclaimed this everywhere, including on her very personal Facebook page which had her very verifiable name splashed all over it. And, I have to admit, Rashia was very good at IRS tax fraud.

Prosecutors have said Wilson was among the most brazen thieves to commit identity theft tax refund fraud in Tampa. In 2011, she boasted to be Tampa’s “queen of IRS tax fraud” in a Facebook post while stealing as much as $20 million, according to court documents.

A prosecutor said Wilson used the money stolen from taxpayers for “personal greed and glorification.” Wilson bought a $90,000 car and a $30,000 birthday party for her 1-year-old daughter with the money, according to court documents.

See? Really good. What she was less good at was keeping that hidden. After brazenly posting about how awesome at crime she was on Facebook, the authorities came more quickly than…no, you know what? I’m not going to make that joke. They just got her, okay?

In any case, faced with 22 years in the clink, Rashia pleaded guilty and then wrote the court an apology letter and begged for leniency. The judge obliged, knocking a whole year off and saddling her with a measly 21 years in the federal pen. Nicely done, Rashia Wilson! Enjoy your stay!

Filed Under: bragging, criminals, irs, rashia wilson, social media, tax fraud

DailyDirt: ATMs Are Ripe For Picking…

Scams

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Thieves are getting more clever about stealing money from ATMs. It used to be that people mostly just had to worry about getting robbed while getting cash at an ATM. In 1998, Joseph Zingher, a Chicago businessman, even patented a “reverse PIN system” called SafetyPIN that would alert police when a cardholder at an ATM entered their PIN in reverse. The idea was that if someone was being forced to withdraw money at an ATM, they could silently alert the police with this “panic code.” Unfortunately for Zingher, he was never able to convince the banking industry to adopt his SafetyPIN system. Now, people have to worry about ATM card skimming and other high-tech theft methods. Here are a few examples of some recent ATM theft methods.

• Like something out of the movie Ocean’s Eleven, cybercriminals working with “cashing crews” in more than two dozen countries managed to steal $45 million from thousands of ATMs in just a few hours. First, the hackers raised the withdrawal limits on several prepaid debit card accounts, then the account information was distributed and encoded onto magnetic-stripe cards. In NYC alone, a team of 8 people withdrew $2.4 million from a few thousand ATMs. [url]
• Thieves glued the cancel button on several ATMs in Spokane, WA. Their hope was that a customer would make a mistake or try to cancel a transaction, and then realize they can’t because the cancel button is stuck. If the customer left in frustration, the thieves could unglue the button and then steal the bank card or continue the transaction. [url]
• A hacker serving a five-year sentence in Romania has invented a device that prevents ATM skimming thefts. The add-on device rotates ATM cards so that skimming devices (as they’re currently designed) can’t read them. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: atm, crime, criminals, fraud, robbery, schemes, skimming, theft, urban legend