Robbing a Mom and Pop Store, Too Close to Home
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âBefore the Devil Knows Youâre Deadâ is a chronicle of destruction â physical, spiritual and moral.
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The theft follows a simple pattern. A little girl asks a customer in a shop for help reaching something on a shelf, and while he or she is distracted another child steals a wallet or cash from their pocket or bag.
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In an effort to curb fraud, many stores require photo ID or other personal information. By Wendy Tanaka. PHILADELPHIA -- With the holiday presents mostly opened, a trip to the merchandise return counter can&#39;t be far behind.
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By Melissa Vargas, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas  Jun. 9--HALTOM CITY -- When a resident near Spring Lake arrived home to  find a brick on her kitchen floor, a shattered window and $5,000 worth of her  belongings gone, she got mad.
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Category killers don&#39;t usually exit gracefully from the markets they establish. By revolutionizing the toy industry and driving every mom-and-pop store off the face of the earth
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Authorities disabled and blew up a device used Tuesday in a bizarre bank robbery in Hollywood, Florida.
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My Dad was a repo man for GMAC, the lending arm of General Motors. At 3, I couldn&#146;t tie my shoes but knew that if you didn&#146;t pay your auto loan on time, Dad would come to your house at 2 a.m. and steal your car. I vividly remember his tales of being chased by large German shepherds and gun-wielding ...
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The young mother called police with a story out of any parent's nightmares. Amanda Reagan Smith says a knife-wielding carjacker forced her to drive to a secluded, wooded area in Greenville, S.C. Once there, he pushed her out, locked the car doors and pressed a pillow to the face of her 7-year-old son.
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Check out the most ridiculous way to lose a bundle.
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SCAGGSVILLE, Md. -- Stephanie Cerneck doesn't go through the checkout line at her supermarket anymore. Or even the self-checkout line. She uses a personal scanner offered by the Bloom grocery store near her home, scanning each item as she takes it off the shelf and bagging as she shops. When she's...
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LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif. - A woman outsmarted an apparently drug-addled burglar who threatened her with a sword, authorities said. Robin Ricketts, 52, said she awoke early Thursday when she heard strange noises coming from her home office.
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On the morning of Nov. 17, Ben Adams found himself hiding beneath the retractable cover in the back of a Chevy TrailBlazer. The truck was parked in front of a warehouse in Duncanville, Texas. His friend &quot;Sam,&quot; the TrailBlazer&#39;s owner, had just finished a test drive on a 1949 Chevy truck--the same truck Adams was certain had been stolen from him four months earlier.Adams pulled out his mobile phone and dialed 911. &quot;Please help me,&quot; he said. &quot;I&#39;m at a warehouse. There are criminals all around me.&quot;The story of how a mild-mannered software developer from San Antonio, Texas,&#160;ended up running his own undercover sting operation against eBay fraudsters begins with a truck. And if the story has a lesson, it&#39;s the one told on Adams&#39;s blog: Don&#39;t mess with Texas, especially if it involves a truck.The Colbert RapportLast July, Adams sold the 1949 Chevy in an eBay auction. The buyer, who called himself Derrick Colbert, appeared to be from Georgia. And when a transport company employee showed up at Adams&#39;s door with a cashier&#39;s check for US$9,600, Adams let him load up the truck and promised to hand over the title when the check cleared.The next day, he learned from his bank that the check was a fake.Adams immediately contacted no fewer than 15 law enforcement organizations and eBay itself, but he also began some sleuthing of his own.He found that the thief had made an important slip-up. While corresponding about the truck, Colbert had sent Adams an e-mail from a second eBay address, different from the one he used to purchase the truck.Hunting Down the ThiefBy tracking the sales and purchases of Colbert&#39;s second eBay ID and contacting a Colorado dealer who had sold him a junky 1950 Chevy truck, Adams was able to track Colbert down to the South Dallas area. But he still didn&#39;t have his truck.By now, Adams had put together a 10-page packet of information and sent it&#160;to every law enforcement agency he could think of. But police didn&#39;t seem to have much interest in working on the case, and although he had reported Colbert to eBay, that didn&#39;t get him anywhere either.&quot;At this point, I was kind of depressed,&quot; remembered Adams. &quot;Every few weeks, I&#39;d do regular eBay searches for all automobiles made between 1948 and 1952 that were within the Dallas-Fort Worth area... I even searched in Craigslist.&quot;And then on November 13, his luck changed.The Big PaybackColbert had listed the pale blue 1950 Chevy for sale on eBay. Only it wasn&#39;t junky anymore, and it didn&#39;t look like the 1950 Chevy that Colbert had bought from the Colorado dealer a few weeks earlier. It looked just like a repainted version of Adams&#39;s 1949 truck. It had the same windows in back, the same missing gas cap, and the same yellow stain across the passenger side of the front windshield.&quot;It made me sick to my stomach,&quot; Adams said. He called local police, but they were skeptical. So he decided to set up a sting.First step: fake ID. He took a tip from the thieves and bought a prepaid mobile phone in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Then using a friend&#39;s well-established eBay account, he placed a couple of bids on the truck to show that he was an interested buyer. His name became &quot;Sam.&quot;He didn&#39;t want to seem too eager. In fact, he didn&#39;t want to do anything to tip Colbert off. And although he thought he might be putting his life at risk, Adams called Colbert and asked to set up a Saturday morning test drive. To be sure that Adams wouldn&#39;t be recognized, a friend volunteered to play the part of &quot;Sam&quot; during the face-to-face meeting.And that&#39;s how Ben Adams ended up hidden inside a Chevy TrailBlazer on a Saturday morning, calling 911. Patrol cars speeding to the scene met up with Adams and his friend about a half-mile from the warehouse and followed the amateur sleuths back to the truck.&quot;They probably had a two-minute window where they probably could have shut the warehouse door and hit the road,&quot; Adams said.But the thieves didn&#39;t leave, and now Adams has his truck back. And this time he plans to keep it.
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By JOHN BRANTON  A thief used a 14-year-old SUV to smash his way into a convenience store in the Rose Village neighborhood and a Minnehaha computer shop over the weekend, police said.
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It's called 'murderabilia'âthe buying and selling of items connected to grisly crime scenes. And it's a brisk business online. Inside the campaign to police the murder market.
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Tycho:  I understand he's posting these around his neighborhood, now, and I mean real Gabe, not the jpeg Gabe like you might see sur le web. If you did find it, I wouldn't bring it back to him. The most likely scenario is that he will assume that you're the one who stole it, and your "reward" will be a savage karate style maneuver delivered to your "sack of toys."
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Most households where kids visit do not safely store guns or household chemicals that can act as deadly poisons, new research shows.
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GREENSBORO, N.C. - Four people who tried to rob a Chinese food delivery driver left him an unusual tip: a cell phone.  Ming Jing Lu arrived at a Greensboro residence with a delivery and noticed a group of people who made him suspicious, police said.