In Hollywood movies, we are led to believe that all criminals are masterminds experts of the craft that only the cleverest of protagonists can stop. But in reality, just like anything else, criminals have a range of proficiency.
Here, people share stories of the dumbest criminals they have ever witnessed in their whole life.
1/29. A few weeks ago I’m getting home from late night classes when this guy jumps out and says “gimmie all your money” or something like that. Problem is, he has no weapon. No gun, no knife, he wasn’t even a threatening looking dude. I just sorta walked past him back to my dorm. Guy keeps at it until we get near my dorm. He gets in front of the door and demands money. I pick up a rusted pipe that was always near the door and he backs off. Laziest criminal ever.
2/29. Back when I worked at Walmart, one of the best laughs I ever got while working there was watching two middle aged women run into the store, grab about fifty of those visa gift cards from the rack, then run out of the store, laughing while they did it.
You have to activate them. They are completely worthless without being activated. I bet they were pretty upset when they realized they had just stolen a whole bunch of nothing.
3/29. When I worked at Hollywood video (before that evil corporation went out of business) a man came into my store and bought one bag of popcorn. When I opened the register he pulled a box cutter out of his pocket and told me to give him all the money.
My first reaction was to laugh. I couldn’t believe I was being robbed. He then waved the box cutter around and swore he wasn’t horsing around to which I told him he wasn’t getting anything. He said he’d cut me and I told him good luck climbing over the counter to get me. He then placed his hands on the counter and leaned towards me. I grabbed a box cutter of my own and said look at that, a stand off. Now here is where it gets silly. The man asked if I was threatening him. I said no sir, still laughing at the situation. He then proclaimed he was calling the police and I said please do. He did and he WAITED for the police to arrive! He told them I brandished a box cutter and threatened his life. I then showed the fine officer our security footage and wouldn’t you know it? He arrested my new friend.
4/29. There were two guys from my high school that robbed a little convenience store. They had ski masks and guns and the robbery went pretty smoothly for them. But they also decided to wear their letterman coats with their names on the back. They were later arrested.Some creepy looking guy tried to carjack me.
5/29. I work at my family’s liquor store and we have a debit/credit machine where we take the card, punch in our store ID/cashier ID, then amount, stick the card in and hand it back.
This one fellow comes in and grabs a six pack front he cooler and comes to the counter. He was the only other person in the store besides a random guy in a corner going through wine, so I rang the six pack in when I saw him grab it. He came up to the till, mumbled something, reached into his coat and pulled out a gun and placed it on the counter with the barrel facing me and slides it a few inches forward.
Due to being used to people doing that with credit/debit cards I just stretched out and grabbed the gun with one hand and the debit machine in the other, he wasn’t holding onto it very firmly so I just pulled it away and I realized as soon as I grabbed it that it was a gun not a credit card so I froze with his gun in my hand and the debit machine in the other. We looked at each other and then he bolted leaving the gun behind.
I called my uncle and then the cops who came and took a statement and after told me that the gun was empty so I wasn’t really in any real danger but its still one of the funniest things to ever happen to me.
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6/29. My dad was in a bank and some guy tries to rob the place. Dad notices the guys gun and tells him to shoot him. The guy wouldn’t do it after constant demand by my dad and left the place.
He tried to rob the bank with a plastic gun.
7/29. A year ago, my room mate and I had just finished having a few rounds at a bar and were looking at some posters hanging up on a building. A man walked up to us and told us to give him all of our money. I looked at my room mate and asked if he had any cash. He said no. I then pulled out my wallet, showed him that it had no cash and just a debit card. “I don’t ever carry cash, neither does he.” “What do you mean you don’t carry cash?” “I mean, just about everywhere accepts plastic now, so we have no reason to carry around money.” “For real?” “Yeah, and if you take the card and use it then the authorities have a record of where you used it, if you can even use it before I could call the company and have it cancelled.” The mugger seemed confused and then shared: “I just got out of prison recently and was in there for about ten years. I didn’t realize that much had changed since I was on the outside.”
So we gave him a cigarette and told him to keep his nose clean before walking away.
8/29. An Aussie guy I know was out drinking in Canada with another Aussie mate, his mate left early to go back to the flat they were sharing in Vancouver and was accosted in a dark alley by two men with knives.
Being absolutely sloshed out of his mind he failed to pick up on the men’s intent, or their knives and simply pushed them aside saying “Nah sorry mate, I’m Australian” and continued home.
The poor fellow later realized that he’d just brushed off two armed muggers by tell them he was Australian and ignoring them…
9/29. I was leaving the supermarket at 8 in the morning and he knocks on my window so I roll it down about an inch.
He asks if I can give him a ride to some gas station, I’m not too familiar with the place so I ask where it is an he points up the road.
Then he tells me I can just drop him at the corner of this street about 100 meters away.
I laughed and told him to walk.
Then he tried to force his way into my car (a 1973 Mercedes) so I opened the door as hard as I could into him and slammed it shut on his fingers.
Those doors weighed like 80 kilos, I know this because I had to take them off to fix some rust around the hinges.
I feel bad for possibly breaking his fingers.
10/29. I worked at a bowling alley in high school. We had a guy climb up into the ceiling in the restroom and wait until we closed, so he could climb down and rob it. Not only did he not get any money (everything was locked up in a gigantic safe from the 1930’s that probably weighed over a thousand pounds), but he couldn’t even get out of the building – all the steel fire doors were padlocked on the outside, and I guess he didn’t want to risk being seen smashing the glass on the front doors, since it was right by a busy road. He did the only logical thing, which was go back to the bar and drink all night – the manager found him passed out on the floor when he opened up in the morning.
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11/29. Dude comes into my store, purchases an item with a hundred dollar bill. I give him his change. He says “that’s not enough change” and reaches across the counter, into the register drawer, to try to grab the money in the till. So I slam the drawer on his fingers. The end!
12/29. Someone stole my laptop and decided it would be smart to use it and post pics/ the story of how he did it.
13/29. I went out at like 2 in the morning to buy cigarettes, tried a few shops but they were all closed. While walking home in sorrow I was accosted by a young man with a knife, who asked quite politely for for all my money… I was a very poor backpacker at the time and the $50 in my pocket was pretty much the last of my money for the month. I showed the guy my empty wallet hoping he would leave it at that but he noticed my bus-pass and decided to take that instead. He then handed me 2 cigarettes and apologized for the “inconvenience” and walked away. In a state of semi-shock I realized that without my bus-pass i had no way of getting the 5am bus to work (damn Vancouver transport company) and expressed my frustration out loud. The guy came back and asked me what was wrong, after I explained he handed me back my bus-pass and said “we’ve all got to make a living somehow”.
Not necessarily a dumb criminal but more a gentlemanly one.
14/29. A couple of people broke into my storage facility once. They cut through the fence and was going through units when they realized there was a camera mounted near them pointed right where they were standing.
They panic, cover their faces up, and then decide to get rid of the camera. They climb up on something and start trying to tear the camera down. While doing this, there is nothing covering their faces anymore and they are literally staring into the lens of the camera no more then 3 feet away.
15/29. I work in a car audio store. This guy shows up wanting us to install his amplifier right now. All my installers are busy and tell him ain’t going to happen today. But tomorrow we can.
He gets all upset and tells me his “boy” will install it himself all he needs is the wires. I show him our amp kits and he picks one out and pays with a credit card and shows me his ID which is good. So the next thing I see is this fool grabbing a box with some entry level 12″ woofers and running out the door and throwing the box into his ride and peeling out of our parking lot. The store was pretty crowded and more than a few customers saw what just went down and asked if should they chase this guy down. I told them no.
I couldn’t believe that this idiot just paid with a credit card and I checked his name and ID and it matched so I had all the information I needed to have him arrested. But I said “OH hell no” I just wrote up a ticket and manually punched in the credit card for 3x the amount something like $585.99 instead of $169.96. The charge got approved and was never contested either. I hope he enjoys his speakers.
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16/29. A friend of my cousin went to a Circle K in a small town & went to buy alcohol. He went to the counter, they asked for ID and he showed it to them. Then he takes out a gun and rob them. Stupidest kid ever, he showed them his ID and was caught.
17/29. My sister used to work at a bank in a Walmart, and her coworker had this somewhat older pickup truck (about fifteen years old at the time of this story). The truck was pretty unremarkable in every way: Stock parts, stock stereo, average looking. Some idiot punched out the driver-side window and stole the CD player, which didn’t play past track 7 on any given CD (mind you, it was stock and ALSO 15 years old). Instead of disconnecting the plugs like a normal thief, he cut all the wires, making it a stolen CD player that now required repair. The idiot bled all over the inside of the truck because he punched the window in, and proceeded to wrap his hand up in one of the girl’s spare work shirt.
After taking the CD player, he then walks into Walmart and tries to steal a TV. Not one of the newer TVs that only weights like 25 pounds– the big tube TVs that weighs like 80. When he walked out, the alarm went off. He told the person at the door that it was a return, and he was simply taking his old one back to his car. Keep in mind that he still had a bloody bank teller’s polo wrapped around his hand… That had an employee’s name on it. An employee who was working at that store at that moment.
Of course the friend and the store pressed charges.
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18/29. I didn’t actually witness this, but I did witness the aftermath.
One afternoon while trying to cook dinner, the power started acting funny. It wasn’t a black out, but more of a brown out, where power dimmed, and came back on, flickered, went out, came back on, dimmed. Up and down for several minutes.
Then eventually the power went out. It would come back on for a few minutes now and then, but it was more or less out for another hour or two.
I found out a couple days later, that some idiot tried to steal copper wire from some power station. The flickering of lights and such was him being cooked by several thousand volts. They got killed trying to steal $100 worth of copper wire…
19/29. Working as a cashier for a grocery store, a customer came and placed a random assortment of things up at my register. Candy, soda, a couple kids toys and a pre cooked chicken from the deli. She mentioned to me that she was from Oregon and would like the tax removed (we can do that in WA for customers from specific states). To do this, she had to give mer her ID so I could record the info on it before removing the tax from the transaction.
After giving her her total she said she would like to pay with a check. She as filling it out as I noticed it was pre signed. I asked her who’s they were and if they were available to come sign the check in front of me. She said they belonged to her mom who was in the car. When she left I saw her get in the passenger seat of a van and leave, so I took down the license plate as they drove off. After this all happened I called my floor manager over and told him what happened. We both shrug and basically say “weird” leaving it at that. Later that day the loss prevention guy calls me up stairs, which is never normally a good thing. He tells me that I had made a good catch, because two women had been going around town with a stolen book of checks and I was the reason the cops had an ID and a license plate to go after.
20/29. This just happened in my town. A man took a car allegedly, since he hasn’t been convicted from an auto repair place after bashing apart the after-hours key box.
When police later found the car, they didn’t have far to look. Inside the car was a McDonald’s receipt and a receipt for the liquor store. Police simply went to both stores and got the video footage of the man going through the drive-thru and stopping at the liquor store in the stolen car.
They needn’t have bothered.
Also inside the car was paperwork from the town’s jail with the man’s name on it.
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21/29. In college, I worked as a Loss Prevention guy for one of the Big Boxes, you know, sit in a little room and watch cameras to catch shoplifters.
We were having a problem with customer’s wallets being stolen out of the Men’s fitting rooms. The victim would go in, try on a new pair of pants, come out to show his wife and when he went back into the fitting room his wallet would be gone.
So one afternoon I get a call from the sales staff about a fight in the Men’s fitting room. I run down there to find a 6’2″ guy with a 5’2″ guy in a headlock. The one guy caught the other guy coming out of his room with his wallet. Turns out the guy’s “wallet” was his Secret Service badge and credentials.
22/29. I was at a house party in high school, and this one kid was playing Edward 40-Hands so he had two bottles duct-taped to his hands. The cops showed up to bust the party, and all the kids scattered like ants. However, this guy, instead of following everyone else around the back of the house and into the woods, decides to try to vault the fence into the neighbor’s backyard. Because he had two bottles strapped to his hands, the only way he could accomplish this was by smashing the bottles on a large rock, grabbing the fence, and lifting himself over. He absolutely tore up his hands, I’m talking, blood everywhere and skin missing. It was disgusting.
Everyone saw him do it, but I guess the cop couldn’t quite tell who it was in the dark. Anyway, Mr. Officer just goes to the nearest hospital and waits for a drunk kid with insane glass lacerations and bloody duct tape all over his hands to show up. Immediately arrested for drinking underage and fleeing the police.
23/29. I once foiled a clever plan by an elderly man at the department store I used to work at. He had a blazer with countless hidden pockets and he was filling them with bottles of Oil of Olay moisturizer. The loss prevention guy called me to help corner him. As he was leaving the door, he saw that I was looking at him and started to run. We ran after him and he looked back at us. That’s where he messed up, he tripped over his own feet and fell like a sack of potatoes. Most of the moisturizer bottles exploded and he was lubed neck to knee. He smelled fantastic though.
24/29. Worked at a video store for quite a while in my late teens early twenties. One day a guy, who looked to be about eighteen or nineteen walked up to the register, sheepishly pulled out a folding pocket knife and told me to give him all my money. The counter I worked behind was elevated by about two feet and only had one entrance which this guy was nowhere near, so there was zero chance of him even being able to touch me.
For some reason, this guy just really pissed me off. I said “no”. He said “what?” And I said “no” again. He then said, “I don’t want to do it but I will cut you man.” I then began to yell, “If you cut me you better cut me good because if I get one hand on you I will end you. I will rip your head right off!” As I am screaming this at him I am climbing over the counter towards him and he is starting to retreat towards the exit quickly. He made it out before I reached him, so I opened the door after he left and yelled something like, “You better keep running! If I ever see you again you are dead!”
I have never been afraid of a fight but if this guy had a gun or serious blade this would have never happened. I was just so pissed off at the idea of him trying to rob me with a three inch folding pocket knife that probably couldn’t cut butter.
25/29. I work part-time in a grocery store that is robbed all the freaking time. Like seriously, once or twice every month. It’s gotten to the point where I now just laugh every time I arrive at work to see the store has been broken into again. One particular night just before we were beginning to close, a brazen robber runs into the store who appears to be no older than twenty with a cricket bat and nervously demanded the money from the register. The clerk obeys and gives the man <$200 (the reward hardly seems proportional to the potential ramifications). At this point the customers at the front end are backing away and the man attempts to make an escape. As he breaks for the door, while I’m standing in an adjacent isle where the soup pleasantly happen to be shelved, I grab a big ol’ can of tomato soup and give it a friendly toss in the vicinity of his face.
KO. Slam dunk. Hole in one.
He takes a comical fall into the flower display in a glorious explosion of flowers and water. Then every customer jumps on the guy and pins him down until the police arrive.
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26/29. Last week, I saw a kid walk up to a skateboarder and attempt to steal his skateboard. The first kid was followed by his two friends, both of whom were shouting “Hector, it’s not your board… let it go.”
Hector did not let go… until the 5 cops came out and arrested him. They were parked outside. He was not a clever young lad.
27/29. I had a homeless man try to steal a 6 pack of Natural Ice. He shoved them into his sweat pants as if I couldn’t see them. He tried this several times. It was as if it were a game to him. I’d catch him, he’d put them back and say “have a nice night” on his way out. He wasn’t trespassed until he pulled a knife on my boyfriend for asking him not to stare at me on his way by.
28/29. Well I used to work at a local pizza place. It was a very small operation usually one or two guys working depending on the day and was in a bad area.
So, one night me and my manager were closing up and the last customer came in the store. I decided I would ring him up, so I walk up to the counter and the man then proceeds to pull a small black box out of his pocket. He then threatens me to give him all the money in the cash register. I thought it was a joke but then he acted as if he was pulling a gun so I stepped back and told my manager what was happening. He calls 911 and the robber grabs the drawer and slams it down on the floor he then grabs a couple 20’s and bolts out of the door. My manager and I go after him and the idiot had parked right out front so we were able to get his license plate with plenty of time. The icing on the cake was he also dropped his black box which happened to be a set of hair clippers.
He tried to rob a store with hair clippers.
29/29. A man dropped off his resume at the coffee bar of the small movie theatre I work at. The barista brings the resume up to me, and in that time, said man notices about $50 worth of tips on the back counter, grabs it and runs. Barista notices the guy running out the door, notices the missing money. The police are called, track down the man via address and phone number on his resume.