Today’s award goes to some truly dumb thieves in Santa Clara, California. A tip o’ the hat to reader Snoggeramus for sending me the link.
It is an only in Silicon Valley kind of story, as police say high-tech thieves were caught stealing thousands of dollars worth of GPS tracking devices from a Santa Clara tech company.
. . .
“The moment we realized they had a box of trackers, we went into recovery mode,” Subramanian said. “We notified the police and equipped them to track the devices, and in about 5 or 6 hours, it was done.”
Before making off with about $18,000 worth of the devices, the thieves grabbed a beer out of the fridge and cut themselves in the process, leaving fingerprints and blood evidence.
But it wasn’t long before the police were using Roambee’s software to locate the devices and the thieves.
“We were able to pinpoint the location of these trackers to a warehouse in Union City and two of the devices had gone mobile, and the thieves were driving around with them in the East Bay,” Subramanian said.
The two men were arrested in Alameda. The storage locker was found to contain drugs and other stolen property.
There’s more at the link.
I ask you! In this day and age, stealing dozens of GPS tracking devices and expecting to get away with it! I don’t know what they were smoking, but whatever it was, it must have addled what passes for their brains.
Peter
I'll admit to profound ignorance on the subject of beer, but… how do you cut yourself getting a beer out of a refrigerator? Was it a real refrigerator, or the Luggage in disguise? Was the beer in some sort of theft-resistant packaging?
ROTFL!
This is known as being hoist by your own petard.
For those of you who have never been so hoisted, it is at least embarrassing, and can be extremely painful.
This caper has got to be the most fiendishly devious technique ever developed for sneaking into prison. Obviously they're on some sort of rescue mission.
I'm feeling sorry for those who miss the reference to The Luggage in the comments. I'm sure this was actually all part of some cunning plan.
Ye Gods and little fishes… Sigh…
The kind of crooks that police love – easy to catch idiots.
I have a suspicion that this was the culmination of a "viral" marketing plan. Perhaps I've been spending too much time comparing features of asset-tracking devices, but it did cause me to check out the website of the company in question.