Turkish police recently arrested a network of scammers who preyed on people’s desire to get rich quickly by selling them fake treasure maps and charging them extra to help them sell the “priceless” loot. As part of a complex operation conducted in 9 Turkish provinces, dozens of con artists collaborated to defraud unwitting victims of more than 50 million Turkish lira ($1.3 million) using fake treasure maps. The suspects reportedly traveled around rural areas of the country, showing hand-drawn treasure maps on artificially aged pieces of paper to villagers looking to get rich overnight. The maps were very detailed and featured nearby locations that the victims were familiar with, unlike the scammers, who claimed to be from far away. As they had problems navigating the area to reach the treasure, they offered to sell their maps for a fee. But this was only half of their admittedly witty scam. Read More »

A Swiss motorist was fined over $100,000 for driving too close to the car in front of him on the motorway. That’s about double the worth of the car he was driving. Switzerland is notorious for its strict driving laws and staggering fines. The European country is one of the few where fines are calculated according to the taxable income of the offender, to ensure that they are felt by the poor and rich alike. For example, a fixed $300 fine may bother someone earning minimum wage, but for a millionaire, it’s like a drop in the ocean. In Switzerland, the wealthier you are, the more you pay, even for minor offenses, which leads to unlikely scenarios where people are fined huge sums of money, sometimes more than what their cars are worth. Case in point, a Swiss lawyer who was fined over $110,000 for driving too close to the car in front of him on a motorway. Read More »

‘El Inmortal’ (The Immortal), is an iconic building in the Ecuadorian city of Machala famous for its precarious look due to having an unusually narrow ground floor. Located on the corner of Pichincha and Buenavista streets in the center of Machala, The Immortal has been defying earthquakes in Ecuador for more than 30 years. Looking at it, you would think that the slightest tremor would be enough to bring the four-storey building down, but you would be wrong. It has survived serious quakes, including one in 2023 measuring 6.5 degrees on the Richter scale, with minimal damage. It’s most famous for having the upper three floors overhanging a whopping five meters without any pillars for support. Its now legendary resistance to earthquakes despite its precarious appearance has earned it the nickname ‘The Immortal’. Read More »

There are around 45,000 species of spider in the world, all of them carnivorous, with one exception – Bagheera kiplingi, a jumping spider known for feeding almost exclusively on plants. Native to the forests of Central America and Mexico, Bagheera kiplingi is only 5-6mm long and spends most of its time on the old leaves of acacia trees, waiting for their opportunity to snatch their favorite meal – the Beltian bodies that grow on the very tips of young acacia leaves. There is only one problem, in order to gorge on their meal of choice, these tiny jumping spiders need to go through a gauntlet of aggressive ants that also feed on Beltian bodies, quickly clip it off with their fangs, and then run away to a safe place to feast on it. Rich in lipids and proteins, Beltian bodies are very nutritious for insects, but extremely unusual for arachnids,  the vast majority of which are carnivorous. Read More »

The Scratcher Girls is an unconventional relaxation therapy studio that charges clients up to $130 per hour for back-scratching and tracing services so relaxing they can put people to sleep. Over the years, we’ve featured our share of unusual services here on Oddity Central, from renting fat people by the hour to professional cuddling and human bed warmers, so we can’t really say we were shocked about the world’s first professional back-scratching service. Founded by 55-year-old Toni George, The Scratcher Girls is the world’s first back-scratching studio and it has been offering scratching and tracing services for years. George claims that she has always enjoyed getting back scratches and one day came to the realization that she may not be the only one, so she decided to start her own back-scratching service. She has been using the 3-inch-long manicured nails to scratch people’s backs ever since, charging up to $130 per hour. Read More »

Located in Antarctica’s McMurdo’s Dry Valleys, the shallow Don Juan Pond is the world’s saltiest body of water. With a salt content that puts the Dead Sea to shame, it remains liquid even at -58 degrees Celsius (-50 Fahrenheit). At four inches deep, Don Juan Pond looks more like a large puddle than an actual pond, but it has fascinated scientists for decades. A liquid puddle of this size in an alien-like environment where temperatures can drop to -50 degrees Fahrenheit was bound to draw attention at one point, and the tiny body of water has been buzzing with scientists since it was discovered in 1961. A quick analysis revealed its salt content to be around 40%; to put that into perspective the world’s oceans have a salinity of 3.5%, the Great Salt Lake varies between 5 and 27 percent, and the famous Dead Sea is 34% salt. Read More »

Fillico Jewelry Water is a Japanese company known for selling one of the most expensive bottled waters in the world, with exclusive limited editions selling for up to $10,000 per bottle. Water is one of the most basic human needs, so marketing and selling it as an ultra-luxury product is a pretty big challenge, even among the snobbiest of snobs, but a Japanese company proved it can be done successfully. Launched in 2005, Fillico Water set out to create a complete luxury experience that would make people reach for their wallets and pay obscene amounts of money to have it. Using some of the purest mineral water in Japan wasn’t nearly enough, so they put a lot of work into the design of the packaging, which was marketed as a work of art in itself. Somehow, they made it work, and today Fillico Jewelry Water is one of the most sought-after ultra-luxury bottled water brands in the world, with prices surpassing $1,000 per liter and even several thousand for limited edition offerings. Read More »

Nigel Richards, a 57-year-old New Zealand scrabble phenom, recently won the 2024 Spanish-Language Scrabble World Championship despite not speaking the language at all. It’s been almost a decade since we first wrote about the talented Mr. Nigel Richards; He had just won the 2015 French-Language Scrabble Championship despite being completely unable to have a conversation in French. It was a remarkable feat that made international news headlines at the time. Richards was already known as the world’s best scrabble player and had earned nicknames like ‘the Tiger Woods of Scrabble,’ but this was completely unheard of. A person who didn’t speak French at all had run through the world’s best French-speaking Scrabble players to earn the title of world champion. Some thought it was a fluke, but Nigel has repeated the feat since, and he recently proved he could do it in other languages he didn’t speak. Read More »

An Argentinian man was wrongfully imprisoned after police mistook 18 containers of talcum powder for cocaine and it took three weeks to analyze the true nature of the substance. In early October, Maximiliano Acosta got on a bus in the town of Mendoza towards the capital, Buenos Aires. Shortly after, the bus was stopped in La Paz for what was supposed to be a routine check by a team of gendarmes. Upon checking the passengers’ baggage, the gendarmes discovered that Acosta had 18 containers of talcum powder and questioned him about it. Despite the man’s explanation that the containers actually contained talcum powder for personal use, the gendarmes detained him on suspicion of drug possession. The tests that followed the arrest, allegedly showed that the 18 containers were full of cocaine, and Maximiliano was put behind bars without so much as alerting his family about his situation. Read More »

An entrepreneur and early crypto investor recently announced a public treasure hunt for five different treasure chests containing valuable items allegedly worth around $2 million. Jon Collins-Black once dreamed of finding valuable treasure, but he managed to become rich by investing in Bitcoin early, so he has spent the last five years planning an epic treasure hunt for other treasure hunters. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the crypto investor started acquiring a collection of valuable items to fill five different treasure chests with before burying them at undisclosed locations across the US. None of the chests are on private property, so technically, anyone can find them, although Collins-Black points out that you need to follow a series of clues and have a sharp mind in order to find even one of the chests.

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A new snack served on the streets of Chengdu, in China, has been getting a lot of attention because of its unusual appearance; it looks like a lump of black human hair. Fa Cai or Fat Choy is a type of dried cynobacterium that has long been a part of Chinese cuisine. It grows mostly in dry and barren desert areas such as Gansu, Shaanxi, Qinghai, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia in China, and is processed by air-drying immediately after harvesting. Because of its dark, filiform shape, it is commonly known as the “hair vegetable”. Fa Cay – scientific name Nostoc flagelliforme – is most often served as black vermicelli in a variety of broths and soups, and served on New Year’s Eve for good luck, because its Cantonese name sounds very similar to the phrase “struck it rich”. However, the dark treat recently went viral as a new street snack that makes it seem like you’re eating human hair. Read More »

A Harvard medical student recently completed an intriguing “eggxperiment” by eating a total of 720 chicken eggs over 28 days to test their effect on his bad cholesterol. Eggs have long had a bad reputation for raising LDL (low-density lipoprotein) or ‘bad’ cholesterol, and even though that perception of the protein-rich food has changed in recent years, many health experts still warn that eggs should be consumed in moderation. However, the results of a recent experiment are bound to once again spark a heated debate around the effects of consuming eggs on a daily basis. Nick Horowitz, a Harvard medical student with a PhD in metabolic health, set out on an extreme experiment to find out what the effects of eating an egg every hour for 28 straight days would have on his health. Not only did he survive the challenge, but the results of his tests during the unusual diet were surprising, to say the least. Read More »

Fat-tailed sheep are a type of domestic sheep mainly found in arid areas and known for accumulating fat, mainly in the rear part of their bodies, which not only gives them a unique look but also helps them stay cool in extreme heat. Native to the Middle East and North Africa, fat-tailed sheep have been around for thousands of years, but some people are still oblivious to their existence, mainly because of their geographical distribution. In the 5th century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about fat-tailed sheep and how shepherds made small wheeled carts to keep their animals’ droopy tails from touching the ground. Although there are several fat-tailed sheep breeds, most of them have broad fat-tails where large amounts of fat are accumulated in buttock-like deposits in the hind parts of a sheep, on both sides. Some of them end up looking like they had a Brazilian butt lift, which makes them really popular with breeders. Read More »

A Russian man who had experienced pain and discomfort under his ribs for the last nine years was shocked to discover that he had a 9 cm glass shard embedded in his liver. The 53-year-old unnamed man told doctors at the Kirov Regional Clinical Hospital, in Russia, that he had long experienced sharp pain and discomfort on the right side of his body, under his ribs, but he never bothered getting it checked out. After finally deciding to seek medical help for his problem, he underwent a CT scan which revealed a sharp object stuck in the right lobe of his liver. When doctors asked what the object might be, the patient told them that he had no idea, as he had no history of trauma, nor could he remember an incident where a sharp object could have entered his body. After operating on the man laparoscopically, surgeons removed a 9-cm-long glass shard from his liver. Read More »

A UK man is trying to take tech giant Apple to court for £5 million ($6.3 million), accusing the company of revealing his private messages with other women to his wife by synchronizing his iPhone with the family iMac. In the last few years of his marriage, Richard (not the man’s real name) had been soliciting the services of sex workers whom he had messaged using his personal iPhone. He had always been very careful to delete the messages from his phone but claimed not to have known that Apple makes it possible to share messages via its various platforms (iPhone, iPad, or iMac) when logging into the same account. One day, when his wife logged into the same family account on the iMac, she discovered years of spicy messages between Richard and multiple other women, who turned out to be sex workers. She ended up divorcing him and walking away with over $6.3 million. Richard blames Apple for everything and he wants the American company to compensate him. Read More »