In what has been described as one of the most daring rackets in history, one or more individuals used a silicone mask to impersonate France’s minister of defense, Jean-Yves Le Drian, and scam an estimated €80 million ($90 million) from wealthy victims.

Jean-Yves Le Drian served as France’s defense minister from 2012 to 2017, and is currently the country’s Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs. He is an important political figure in his homeland, but also a relatively obscure one, which is why investigators believe he was chosen as the target of one of the boldest identity thefts in recorded history. One or more scammers used a custom silicone mask and a cleverly decorated office to fool various members of government and wealthy businessman into thinking that they were being contacted by Mr. Le Drian who requested financial help to pay the ransoms of journalists captured by Islamists in the Middle East. Some of the victims saw through the ruse, but many complied and donated millions.

The scam was simple yet pretty well thought out. Scammers would pose as a member of Le Drian’s inner circle and contact both french and foreign businessmen to arrange a conversation with the esteemed “minister”. In the beginning, the conversations were carried out over a phone, with the scammer impersonating the French minister reproducing Le Drian’s voice almost to perfection.  But, then, in order to make the  whole thing even more believable, they switched to video calls via Skype.

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An Indian businessman who allegedly staged a stupid plane hijacking hoax to get his wife fired by the airline so they could spend more time together was recently sentenced to life in prison.

Birju Salla, the 38-year-old scion of a wealthy family of jewellers based in Mumbai, became the first person to be sentenced under India’s strict Anti-Hijacking Act of 2016. The funny thing is that he never actually intended to hijack a plane, all he wanted was to get his beloved  fire so they could spend more time together. He told the court that by printing a hijacking threat and planting it in the toilet of a Jet Airways plane, the airline would close its Delhi operation and fire his younger wife, so she would be forced to return to Mumbai where they could be together more. Things didn’t work out quite as planned…

Birju Salla’s troubles began when, during his frequent flights from Mumbai to Delhi, he fell in love with a Jet Airways customer care executive. They began having an affair in 2017, but the businessman quickly became frustrated with how little time they spent together. He felt that her job was always getting in the way of their love, so in July of 2017 he secretly married her – although he was already married and had two children – and asked her to move to Mumbai with him. She refused, and that’s when he allegedly hatched a ridiculously stupid plan to get her fired.

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Police in the Netherlands are offering samples of a special MDMA-scented perfume to the public in the hopes that it will help people detect and report drug labs when they pass by them.

Despite the best efforts of Dutch police to curb drug manufacturing and traffic, the Netherlands is still considered the MDMA production capital of the world. Having exhausted traditional ways of battling drug crime, they’ve now taken an unconventional approach, creating a special perfume called XTACY which has an aroma very similar to the sweet smell of MDMA, a recreational drug commonly known as ‘Ecstasy’. But they’re not selling it. Instead, they’re offering samples to the public, to get them familiarized with the smell of the drug, so that when they casually walk by a drug lab producing the illegal substance, they can notify authorities about it.

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Armed robberies have become so common in Mexico City that people have started buying fake smartphones to hand over to trigger-happy criminals who would rather shoot them than leave empty-handed.

Walking on the street or getting on public transportation in Mexico City have become increasingly risky affairs. According to recently released data, there were an average of 70 violent reported muggings in the Mexican capital in the first four months of 2019. Around two thirds of these crimes targeted pedestrians, while the rest were evenly committed against public transportation passengers and motorists stuck in traffic jams or waiting at traffic lights. The incidence of such crimes has been steadily increasing in the city, but it has gotten so bad that people are now buying fake smartphones to hand over to muggers instead of their real ones.

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A young dog breeder in eastern China was recently arrested and sentenced to ten days in a detention center after giving two of his canines controversial names that refer to Chinese government and civil service workers.

The 30-year-old man, surnamed Ban, was summoned by police on Monday, after posting on Chinese social network WeChat that he had named two of his dogs Chengguan and Xieguan. The first refers to officials tasked with tackling low-level crime, while the second is a name used to describe informal community workers, such as traffic assistants. Ban said that he didn’t know using the two words as names for his dogs was illegal, and that he had done it as a joke, but police failed to see the humor and launched an investigation after the man’s post went viral online.

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An Italian man who went to great lengths to convince everyone that he had lost the ability to walk after being involved in a staged car accident 12 years ago was recently exposed as a fraud.

The incredible story of Roberto Guglielmi, an Italian con artist who managed to fool everyone, including doctors, neighbors and even the Pope, that he couldn’t walk began over a decade ago. In 2007, he came up with a plan to pass himself off as a disabled person and collect the pension offered by the government, but he needed an accomplice to pull it off. At the time, he had someone living in his home who was behind on rent, so he proposed to forget about the payment he was owed if his housemate would pretend to hit him with the car while he was crossing the street. The man agreed and everything went smoothly. With the help of a false medical document, Guglielmi was able to become a paraplegic, even though he could walk like a normal person.

What’s most remarkable about this tale of deception is the extreme lengths that the Florentine went to in order to deceive doctors during mandatory visits to confirm his disability. According to prosecutors, he would inject lidocaine into his legs to numb his muscles, undergo traumatic therapies and use a wheelchair whenever he left his home. For over a decade, no one suspected that he was actually a healthy person with full use of his legs.

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A 40-year-old Oregon has been arrested for allegedly staging an elaborate home invasion to cover up the theft of his daughter’s Girl Scout cookie sales.

On March 6 the Forest Grove Police Department responded to a 911 call for a possible break-and-enter and assault. When officers arrived at the scene of the alleged crime, they found 40-year-old Brian Couture, the person who had made the emergency call, unresponsive. The man later told police that an unknown individual had entered his home through a sliding glass door, and despite his attempts to restrain him, the burglar managed to escape. A special K9 unit was dispatched in the neighborhood to search for the suspect, which reportedly caused panic among residents.

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A 19-year-old Missouri man admitted to spiking co-workers’ drinks with LSD because they were “too uptight” and “needed to have better energy”.

What’s the fastest way to change your co-workers’ mood and help them relax? Well, according to a young Enterprise Rent-A-Car employee, lacing their drinks with strong mood-altering drugs without telling them is one way of going about it.

Two employees at an Enterprise Rent-A-Car office in Arnold, Missouri, needed to be hospitalized last week after reporting symptoms like dizziness and uncontrollable shaking, for no apparent reason. Their manager called an ambulance, but also notified the police about the situation, after seeing another member of her staff holding a dropper and messing with everyone’s drinks. Confronted by the officers, the man nonchalantly admitted to spiking his colleagues drinks with LSD, because they had “negative energy”.

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Police in Zhenxiong, China’s Yunnan province recently apologized after being ridiculed online for using a 17-year-old suspected criminal’s childhood photo for a wanted poster, because they couldn’t find a more recent one.

Look at those chubby cheeks! Does this look like the face of someone who could commit gang crimes and other violent offences? Well, technically, yes. You see, the photo below is of Ji Qinghai, a dangerous alleged criminal who has been successfully avoiding police for a long time. He’s also just a pre-schooler in this picture, which makes things a bit confusing. He’s actually 17 now, but police couldn’t find any recent photos of him, so they just decided to go with one of him as an adorable kid.

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A North Carolina university student who thought her apartment was haunted after things started disappearing was shocked to find a creepy man hiding in her closet and wearing her clothes.

The female student, who only wanted to be identified as Maddie, had grown to think that the off-campus apartment she shared with a roommate was haunted after her clothes started disappearing and strange handprints started appearing on mirrors and walls. However, on Saturday, she found that she wasn’t dealing with a ghost, but something equally as terrifying – a strange man hiding in her closet and wearing her clothes.

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William J. Gallagher, a 68-year-old career criminal who had just been released from prison after a 20-year sentence, recently robbed a Wisconsin bank, with the sole purpose of getting arrested and sent back to prison.

Six months after finishing his 20-year prison sentence at a penitentiary in New Jersey for attempted homicide, Gallagher took an Amtrak train to Chicago, then another one to Milwaukee, in Winsconsin, where he headed straight to a Chase bank with the intention to rob it. But this wasn’t your usual bank robbery. Instead of getting as much money as possible and trying to escape before the police arrived, Gallagher demanded some $100 bills, then casually asked the bank teller to call the police, and simply waited for them to arrive and arrest him. His goal was never to escape with the money, but to get sent back to prison for his crime.

The New York native had spent so much time behind bars that he simply couldn’t adjust to life on the outside, and after remembering that a fellow inmate had once told him that prisons in Wisconsin were the best in the United States, he decided to travel there and commit a crime so he could go back to his old life.

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For over a decade, residents of the O Calvario and A Doblada neighborhoods in the Spanish city of Vigo have been living in fear of finding their cars scratched or with toothpicks jammed in the keyhole. The culprit? A 79-year-old man who has reportedly vandalized over 1,000 cars in the last year alone.

Most often than not, vandals try to make sure there are no witnesses before damaging someone else’s property, but that’s not how Jose Antonio V., a 79-year-old man from Vigo, operates. He scratches parked cars and jams toothpicks into their keyholes in broad daylight, with a total disregard disregard for witnesses. And if someone dares to say something or try to stop him, the old man gets aggressive and often hits people with his cane. Police estimate that last year alone, the notorious vandal damaged around 1,120 cars, and he’s off to a “great” start in 2019 as well, with evidence linking him to over 120 vandalized vehicles.

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An insurance agent in Singapore recently got himself arrested after attempting to scam clients by sending them threatening letters signed by “Lord Voldermort”, a misspelling of Lord Voldemort, the main antagonist of the popular Harry Potter books.

Ye Lin Myint, a Myanmar national working for the Singapore branch of Prudential Insurance, targeted potential or former clients who rejected him in the past. They were either potential clients who had refused to get insurance policies from him, or former clients who hadn’t turned up for scheduled appointments or had canceled their insurance policies. In July of 2017, Ye used his wife’s laptop to register an email account with a Switzerland-based email service that did not request any personal, using the name “Lord Voldermort”. He then created a Bitcoin wallet and linked it to the email account and started sending threatening letters to his victims, requesting one Bitcoin in exchange for their safety and that of their families.

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An Irish man who swallowed an expensive diamond ring at a jewellery store in Turkey recently told prosecutors that he wasn’t himself when he did it, because he “fell into a trance” the moment he saw the beautiful diamond.

Ian Campbell, who was vacationing in the Turkish seaside resort of Marmaris, was arrested on October 4, 2018, after swallowing a $40,000 diamond ring at a local jewellery store. Eyewitnesses later told police that Campbell swallowed the jewel in desperation, after realizing that he was going to be caught trying to steal it. Prosecutors instructed police to take the would-be-thief to the local hospital, where he was administered laxatives to help him “return” the 2.5-carat diamond ring by natural means. Turkish media tracked the “journey” of the jewel through Campbell’s stomach almost in real time, but sadly it got stuck and had to be surgically removed.

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A young Alabama vet student was recently arrested for allegedly pulling off one of the sickest scams imaginable. She took older horses from their owners, promising that they would live out the rest of their lives in a sanctuary, but later sold them to be slaughtered.

24-year-old Fallon Blackwood used her educational background as a veterinary student to gain the trust of horse owners who could no longer take care of their older animals. She told several of her victims that she owned an 18-acre farm in Boaz, Alabama, where she could look after the elderly horses, but only if they willingly placed them in her care, as she didn’t have the money to buy them. After taking the horses off their owners’ hands, Blackwood allegedly sold them to kill-buyers to be shipped to Mexican slaughterhouses. The third-year vet student is believed to be responsible for the disappearance of nearly 50 horses.

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