A Widnes Cocaine Boss Who Chose the Encrypted Phone Network Precisely So No One Would Ever Know His Name Proceeded to Tell Everyone His Name — Posting a Selfie With a Balloon and a Gas Canister That Tied Him to His Account, Then Signing His Messages 'Col From Widnes' and 'Three Phones Jones'

The entire value of an encrypted criminal network is anonymity, a thing Jones paid for and then threw away with both hands — first by photographing himself with a balloon distinctive enough to serve as a signature, then by volunteering the one piece of information the encryption existed to conceal: his name. A man who nicknames himself 'three phones Jones' on a wiretap-proof platform has confused secrecy with an audience, and the gap between the two cost him seventeen years. The phones were encrypted; the man holding them was not.

Source: Liverpool Echo

A Las Vegas Nurse Practitioner Accused of Billing Medicare and TRICARE Nine Hundred and Six Million Dollars for Wound Care No One Needed Did Not Quietly Bank the Proceeds but Converted Them Into a Ferrari, an Eight-Hundred-Sixty-Five-Thousand-Dollar Bulgari Necklace, and a Beach Resort in the Philippines

Marizel Yukee's indictment alleges a $906 million wound-care scheme whose proceeds were not hidden but displayed: a $594,000 Ferrari, an $865,000 Bulgari necklace, and a $4.6 million beach resort, the curriculum vitae of a woman who believed the federal government would fund her shopping indefinitely and never ask to see the wounds. Federal investigators have already seized some $35 million in cars, jewelry, and cash, which is the trouble with converting fraud into trophies — the trophies come with receipts, and the receipts come with addresses. She mistook a heavily audited federal health program for a personal line of credit, and the line, predictably, called.

Source: Nurse.org (indictment, U.S. District Court, S.D. Tex.)

Two Birmingham Men Who Stripped Football Fans' Parked Cars of Headlights, Mirrors, and Bonnets in Minutes Decided the Crucial Missing Element Was Documentation, So They Filmed Themselves Doing It and Posted the Footage Online

Mohammed Khan and Mohammed Haydar ran what police called a 'car cannibalism' operation around Birmingham City's St Andrew's stadium on matchdays — and then, not content merely to commit nearly a hundred and twenty thefts, decided to film and photograph themselves committing them and publish the results, assembling for the prosecution a complete, time-stamped, self-narrated evidence file at no cost to the taxpayer. Khan admitted 98 offences and Haydar 20; both were jailed for four years and three months. They treated a years-long crime spree as a content series, and the audience that mattered most was watching from the Crown Prosecution Service.

Source: Dudley News

A Lake Wales Woman Who Had Just Been Ticketed for Driving Around a Blocked Work Zone Was So Aggrieved by the Citation That She Followed the Deputy and Called 911 to Complain About It — Summoning, to Her Own Location, the Police, Who Then Found Twenty-Eight Bags of Fentanyl

Gina Redding, 48, received a traffic ticket and concluded that the appropriate response was to pursue the deputy who issued it and dial the emergency line to lodge a grievance — an act that converted a citation into an arrest for misuse of 911 and, after the mandatory jail body scan, the discovery of twenty-eight bags of fentanyl. Sheriff Grady Judd observed that 'occasionally I tell you stories that you just can't believe.' The woman was carrying enough narcotics to guarantee that the last thing on earth she should want is the sustained attention of law enforcement, and she telephoned to demand exactly that.

Source: Tampa Free Press

A Miami Gardens Man Released From Jail After a High-Speed Chase Celebrated His Freedom by Stealing an SUV — From the Parking Lot of a Courthouse — and Leading Police on a Second High-Speed Chase Within the Same Week

Jefry Chaucanes Vasquez, 23, was arrested for a high-speed chase, released, and then — apparently finding the experience insufficiently complete — allegedly stole a Ford SUV to stage an encore, selecting as his theft site the parking lot of the Plantation Key Courthouse, which is to say the one building in the county where the density of law enforcement approaches a physical constant. A man who has just been freed pending charges and immediately reoffends in the literal shadow of the judiciary is not testing his luck; he is daring the universe to be as patient as it has so far foolishly been. It declined.

Source: Tampa Bay Times

A Mumbai Bike Thief Engineered a Genuinely Clever Escape From a Police Station — Prying the Panes and Grille From a Washroom Window While Pretending to Use the Toilet — and Then Spent His Hard-Won Liberty Traveling Directly to the Single Most Predictable Address on Earth: His Own Home

Chetan Kaatkar, 24 — already caught the first time by CCTV — extracted himself from the Kamothe police station through a dismantled washroom window, a feat requiring real nerve and no small ingenuity, and then squandered every ounce of it by boarding a train to the precise location any constable would check first: his house in Wadala, where a team tracking him by camera recovered him within six hours. He solved the hard problem of the window and then failed the easy one of where a fugitive ought not to go, earning a fresh charge for escaping custody and confirming that cleverness and sense are not the same faculty.

Source: Times of India

A Miami Man Annoyed by an Auto-Lease Dispute Resolved to Settle It by Impersonating a Federal Prosecutor, Forging the Seal of the United States Department of Justice, and Mailing His Counterfeit Straight to the Company — Thereby Inviting the Actual Justice Department to Investigate the Forgery of Its Own Emblem

Paul Richard Johnson, 55, is charged with fraudulent use of a government seal after allegedly posing as a federal prosecutor and sending an automotive manufacturer letters bearing a counterfeit DOJ seal to win a private lease squabble — a plan that required, as its very first step, manufacturing federal interest in a matter that had none, and directing that interest at himself. To forge the seal of the Department of Justice and put it in the mail is to ask the one agency you should most wish to avoid to please come and examine your handiwork. They did.

Source: U.S. Department of Justice (USAO-NJ)

A Kentucky District Judge Who Raised His Voice, Slammed His Hand on the Bench, and Ordered a Defendant to Treat HIM 'With Deference and Respect' Was Himself Found to Have Jailed a Man for Eleven Days With No Notice and No Hearing — and Has Now Signed a Public Reprimand

A judge whose central grievance was that a defendant had failed to render him sufficient 'deference and respect' turns out to have spent eleven days holding a man in a cell with neither notice nor hearing — a sequence that locates, with uncommon precision, the difference between the respect a robe is owed and the respect a man has earned. The Commission found nine such incidents, which is less a lapse than a method. He demanded reverence as a matter of office and dispensed contempt, in the technical sense, as a matter of mood; the reprimand is the institution gently reminding him which of the two the robe was supposed to supply.

Source: WKYT (CBS Lexington) — Kentucky Judicial Conduct Commission Public Reprimand

A San Francisco Retiree Who Volunteers on a Hotline Warning Lonely Seniors About Romance Scams Wired More Than Half a Million Dollars to 'Annie,' a Woman From 'Japan' He Met on Facebook and Never Once Saw, Telling His Own Son Who Begged Him to Stop: 'My Choice, My Life'

Every actor in Adan Look's own life — his son, the FBI, the Secret Service, the police, the lawyer — assembled to tell him the same thing, and he answered the entire chorus with 'my choice, my life,' which is the sound a man makes when he has decided that being chosen by a fantasy is worth more than being right. The exquisite cruelty is the day job: he mans a hotline counseling the lonely against the precise scam liquidating his savings, dispensing to strangers the wisdom he refused to accept from his own family. He was not deceived for lack of information. He was deceived because the truth was less flattering than the lie.

Source: ABC7 News (KGO San Francisco)

A Rock Legend Too Ill to Sing for the Paying Customers in Utah on Friday Was, by Saturday, Well Enough to Board a Private Jet to Boston for a World Cup Match — and Conceded, on Reflection, That It 'Wasn't a Good Look'

No one begrudges an eighty-one-year-old man his health, and the laryngitis is real; what invites the raised eyebrow is the arithmetic of a body too compromised to perform for ticket-holders on Friday yet equal to a transcontinental flight and a stadium on Saturday. The cancellation and the celebration were separated by less than a day and a single act of will, and the press dutifully relayed both — the noble withdrawal and the joyful jaunt — without troubling to set them side by side. Stewart, to his modest credit, did the subtraction himself: 'wasn't a good look.' It was not.

Source: Hello Magazine

American College Students, Filmed Meeting the Most Elementary General-Knowledge Questions With the Unshakeable Composure of People Who Have Never Once Entertained the Possibility That They Might Be Wrong

Source: KeroNgb (YouTube street interviews)