Tag: THEFT

digg_url ='http://www.switched.com/2010/03/05/mission-impossible-style-best-buy-thieves-swipe-laptops-baffl/'; Share There's a very good reason that 'Mission Impossible' is a movie: it's impossible. The "Don't Try This At Home" disclaimer pretty much goes without saying for virtually anything involving Tom Cruise, and certainly for the kinds of Hollywood stunts featured in the 'M.I.' ...

Dumb thieves are really our bread-and-butter here at Switched. We love them. Every time some idiot leaves the original "home" address programmed into a stolen GPS, or stops to check his Facebook mid-heist, we're there to mock him. And when word reached us of an Illinois man who was busted sitting on the couch of his robbery victim -- playing her Nintendo DS -- we paused, chuckled to ourselves, and ...

With more and more applications moving to the Internet, it's getting easier and easier for one shady developer to rip off the work of another. Often, you can easily see the source code (the behind-the scenes plumbing that makes it all happen) of a given site and then copy it for your own with just a few clicks. Change a few images and, presto, you've got your own app. That's apparently what MSN ...

If you don't take the necessary precautions, a portable GPS mounted on the dash of your car is an ideal target for somebody with sticky fingers. We don't know why, but some people are just too lazy to tuck the device away in the glove box or bring it inside. For those folks, Maplock might be the perfect addition to their car, which is probably already riddled with more gadgets than Best Buy. ...

Straight from our WTF files -- thieves managed to walk off with the $100,000, five-foot-tall, remote-controlled robot dinosaur from the 'Walking With Dinosaurs' show on opening night in Guadalajara, Mexico. How the crooks got past security and into where the dino-bots were being held, or even how they managed to walk out the door with an animatronic beast the size of an eighth-grader isn't ...

Normally, when we cover thefts at Switched, there is some connection to the real world, whether it be to iPhones or credit cards. But the only thing tangible about a recent heist in Britain was the arrest. According to the Telegraph, a man was arrested for allegedly using a phishing scam to obtain the log-in information of individuals who play the online role-playing game 'RuneScape.' The ...

We can only assume this is an issue with the limitations of Google Translate, otherwise we'd have to say that the description of CEVA Logistics as "annoyed" with the theft of €2 million (roughly $3 million) worth of iPhones from its warehouse in Belgium is the understatement of the year. The firm was the victim, in what appears to be an inside job, of an elaborate heist that resulted in the ...

With the advent of cheap cell phones, in-car valet systems like OnStar slowly started to fade away. OnStar is one of the few that has survived, thanks to its partnership with GM and the addition of features unreproducible by cell phones (e.g., remote unlocking and vehicle tracking). One of those features is an anti-theft system called Stolen Vehicle Slowdown. The system, which sends a signal to ...

The saddest part about this story is that this isn't the first time this has happened -- a burglar stops in the middle of his robbery to log on to his Facebook account from his victim's PC, leaving behind evidence leading to his swift arrest. This time is was 26-year-old Italian man who was arrested after he broke into a home in Albano Laziale outside of Rome. According to the Telegraph, when ...

A former government employee amassed quite a collection of DVDs over the years, but there's one problem. They were all stolen property. Myles Weathers, who worked at a postal sorting facility in Springfield, Massachusetts, plead guilty Tuesday to federal theft charges. According to The Smoking Gun, Weathers swiped 3,012 Netflix DVDs, worth about $36,471, during his tenure as a postal worker. ...

Several weeks ago, brazen thieves stole 31 computer monitors from a Canadian man's driveway as he was preparing to load them for transport. In Minneapolis on the 4th of July, an even more audacious (or inebriated) would-be bandit reached through local resident Jesse Phoutthaphaphone's window and stole his laptop, directly out of the shocked Phoutthaphaphone's hands. According to local NBC ...

We here at the Switched offices have seen a lot of stories about stupid people, including a few about seriously dumb thieves, but this tale about some moronic criminals from Morelia, Mexico is certainly our favorite. Unlike this tale about thieves who left behind perfectly good steal-ables, our friends from Mexico didn't take anything that could possibly be construed as valuable. Employees at a ...

Residents of Kelowna, British Columbia were shocked and appalled when, in early June, thieves pilfered dozens of computer screens from a resident's driveway, according to The Province. Kelowna General Hospital had donated the monitors to Trinity Baptist Church, and had planned to then distribute the screens to impoverished hospitals in Cameroon, Africa. As a church volunteer loaded the monitors ...

People have been using Google Earth to find all sorts of crazy things: secret military installations, marijuana crops, sunken ships, and pools for "dipping." Thieves have even used the satellite imaging app to seek out lead roof tiles. So it should come as no surprise that other criminals are now making use of the tool to steal fish. (Well, maybe kind of surprising.) According to the Telegraph, ...

Police tracked down a burglar in Boca Raton, Florida this week thanks to some ill advised text messaging. According to PalmBeachPost.com, police responded to reports of a break-in when witnesses said they'd watched a young man enter an apartment window and exit carrying electronic devices. Another not-so-secretive boy had been seen using a cell phone as a flashlight to illuminate the window. ...