10 Most Mysterious Cyber Crimes

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Infosecurity - Comment: How to Fight Back against Cybercriminals

10 Most Mysterious Cyber Crimes

The most nefarious and crafty criminals are the ones who operate completely under the radar. In the computing world security breaches happen all the time, and in the best cases the offenders get tracked down by the FBI or some other law enforcement agency.

But it's the ones who go uncaught and unidentified (those who we didn't highlight in our Cyber Crime Hall Fame that are actually the best. Attempting to cover your tracks is Law-Breaking 101; being able to effectively do so, that's another story altogether.

When a major cyber crime remains unsolved, though, it probably also means that those of us outside the world of tech crime solving may never even know the crime occurred.

These are some of the top headline-worthy highlights in the world of unsolved computing crime—cases in which the only information available is the ruin left in their wake.

The WANK Worm (October 1989)

Possibly the first "hacktivist" (hacking activist) attack, the WANK worm hit NASA offices in Greenbelt, Maryland. WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) ran a banner (pictured) across system computers as part of a protest to stop the launch of the plutonium-fueled, Jupiter-bound Galileo probe. Cleaning up after the crack has been said to have cost NASA up to a half of a million dollars in time and resources. To this day, no one is quite sure where the attack originated, though many fingers have pointed to Melbourne, Australia-based hackers.

Ministry of Defense Satellite Hacked (February 1999)
A small group of hackers traced to southern England gained control of a MoD Skynet military satellite and signaled a security intrusion characterized by officials as "information warfare," in which an enemy attacks by disrupting military communications. In the end, the hackers managed to reprogram the control system before being discovered. Though Scotland Yard's Computer Crimes Unit and the U.S. Air Force worked together to investigate the case, no arrests have been made.

CD Universe Credit Card Breach (January 2000)
A blackmail scheme gone wrong, the posting of over 300,000 credit card numbers by hacker Maxim on a Web site entitled "The Maxus Credit Card Pipeline" has remained unsolved since early 2000. Maxim stole the credit card information by breaching CDUniverse.com; he or she then demanded $100,000 from the Web site in exchange for destroying the data. While Maxim is believed to be from Eastern Europe, the case remains as of yet unsolved.

Ministry of Defense Satellite Hacked (February 1999)Military Source Code Stolen (December 2000)
If there's one thing you don't want in the wrong hands, it's the source code that can control missile-guidance systems. In winter of 2000, a hacker broke into government-contracted Exigent Software Technology and nabbed two-thirds of the code for Exigent's OS/COMET software, which is responsible for both missile and satellite guidance, from the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C. Officials were able to follow the trail of the intruder "Leaf" to the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany, but that's where the trail appears to end.

Anti-DRM Hack (October 2001)
In our eyes, not all hackers are bad guys often they're just trying to right a wrong or make life generally easier for the tech-consuming public. Such is the case of the hacker known as Beale Screamer, whose FreeMe program allowed Windows Media users to strip digital-rights-management security from music and video files. While Microsoft tried to hunt down Beale, other anti-DRM activists heralded him as a crusader.

Dennis Kucinich on CBSNews.com (October 2003)
As Representative Kucinich's presidential campaign struggled in the fall of 2003, a hacker did what he could to give it a boost. Early one Friday morning the CBSNews.com homepage was replaced by the campaign's logo. The page then automatically redirected to a 30-minute video called "This is the Moment," in which the candidate laid out his political philosophy. The Kucinich campaign denied any involvement with the hack, and whoever was responsible was not identified.

Hacking Your MBA App (March 2006)
Waiting on a college or graduate school decision is a nail-biting experience, so when one hacker found out how to break into the automated ApplyYourself application system in 2006, it was only natural that he wanted to share the wealth. Dozens of top business schools, including Harvard and Stanford, saw applicants exploiting the hack in order to track their application statuses. The still-unknown hacker posted the ApplyYourself login process on Business Week's online forums; the information was promptly removed and those who used it were warned by schools that they should expect rejection letters in the mail.

The 26,000 Site Hack Attack (Winter 2008)
MSNBC.com was among the largest of the thousands of sites used by a group of unknown hackers earlier this year to redirect traffic to their own JavaScript code hosted by servers known for malware. The malicious code was embedded in areas of the sites where users could not see it, but where hackers could activate it.

Supermarket Security Breach (February 2008)

Overshadowed only by a T.J Maxx breach in 2005, the theft of at least 1,800 credit and debit card numbers (and the exposure of about 4.2 million others) at supermarket chains Hannaford and Sweetbay (both owned by the Belgium-based Delhaize Group) in the Northeast United States and Florida remains unsolved more than six months later. Chain reps and security experts are still unclear as to how the criminals gained access to the system; the 2005 T.J.Maxx breach took advantage of a vulnerability in the chain's wireless credit transfer system, but Hannaford and Sweetbay do not use wireless transfers of any sort. Without more information, the difficulty in tracking down those responsible grows exponentially.

Comcast.net Gets a Redirect (May 2008)

A devious hack doesn't always mean finding a back door or particularly crafty way into a secure network or server; sometimes it just means that account information was compromised. Such was the case earlier this year when a member of the hacker group Kryogeniks gained unauthorized access to Comcast.net's registrar, Network Solutions. The domain name system (DNS) hack altered Comcast.net's homepage to redirect those attempting to access webmail to the hackers' own page. Spokespeople for Comcast and Network Solutions are still unclear as to how the hackers got the username and password.

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The Greatest Hacks of All Time
Michelle Delio Email 02.06.01

Reader's advisory: Wired News has been unable to confirm some sources for a number of stories written by this author. If you have any information about sources cited in this article, please send an e-mail to sourceinfo[AT]wired.com.

In 1972, John T. Draper discovered he could make free long-distance phone calls using a whistle from a Cap'n Crunch cereal box. The whistle emitted a 2,600-hertz tone that got him into the internal authorization system at the phone company.

With another noisy device known as a blue box, Draper -- soon to be known as "Cap'n Crunch" -- made it possible for many to reach out and touch someone without having to pay for the privilege.

And so was born the modern technology hack. It certainly wasn't the first effort to rig something up to avoid conventional protocols, but it definitely helped trigger a decades-long, sometimes-underground movement to maneuver through security, avoid paying for things, and even cause some malicious damage here and there.

The recent spate of security breaches and e-mail invasions including Monday's news trilogy -- the World Economic Forum hack, the JavaScript email wiretapping scare, and the hole discovered in the protocol that is supposed to secure data transmitted wirelessly -- recalls some of the most infamous exploits of the past.

Here, then, is one observer's list of The Greatest Hacks of All Time.

Captain Zap: Ian Murphy, known to his friends as Captain Zap, was the first cracker to be tried and convicted as a felon. Murphy broke into AT&T's computers in 1981 and changed the internal clocks that metered billing rates. People were getting late-night discount rates when they called at midday.

Of course, the bargain-seekers who waited until midnight to call long distance were hit with high bills.

Murphy, now the chairman of IAM/Secure Data System, was the inspiration for the movie "Sneakers."

The Morris Worm: On Nov. 2, 1988, Robert Tappan Morris released a worm that brought down one-tenth of the Internet –- which back then meant he crippled more than 6,000 computer systems.

Named the Morris Worm, this exploit inspired the founding of a governmental anticyber-terrorism team, CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team), to deal with future Morris worms.

Morris made the mistake of chatting about his worm for months before he actually released it on the Internet, so it didn't take long for the police to track him down.

Morris was one of the first to be tried and convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, but he only had to perform community service and pay a fine, since the argument was made that the worm didn't destroy the contents of affected computers.

Morris said it was just a stunt, and added that he truly regretted wreaking $15 million worth of damage. That's what it cost to de-worm the machines his critter had penetrated.

Morris's father, Robert Morris Sr., was at the time a computer security expert with the National Security Agency.

The MOD and LOD Squads: In 1993, the Masters Of Deception (MOD) were the first crackers ever to get busted via wiretaps.

The MOD were mostly Phone Phreaks: folks who had fun with the telephone system. They were famous for figuring out ways to avoid paying for long-distance calls, and could also listen in on private conversations, and create huge party lines that allowed many people to chat to each other at one time.

MOD also hacked its way into many a database, including those belonging to the National Security Agency, AT&T, and the Bank of America. They also accessed credit-record reporting agency TRW's computer system, and were able to gain access to credit reports of the rich and famous.

MOD was also famous for the wars they engaged in with the Legion of Doom (LOD), another cracker group that had the reputation of being the headquarters for the most elite hackers.

Due to internal struggles among the members, the infamous cracker Phiber Optik left LOD and formed MOD. The groups then battled each other for the crown of Cracker King for years, until most of them got busted in 1993.

Many say that MOD members would not have gotten caught if they hadn't been competing against LOD; the war made them less cautious than they should have been.

Kevin Mitnick: Snagged by the FBI on Feb. 15, 1995, Kevin Mitnick was the very first person to be convicted of gaining access to an interstate computer network for criminal purposes. He was also the first cracker to have his face appear on an FBI "Most Wanted" poster.

Mitnick was charged with stealing at least $1 million worth of sensitive project data from computer systems, snagging thousands of credit card numbers from online databases, breaking into the California motor vehicles database, and remotely controlling New York and California's telephone switching hubs on various occasions -- and he also possessed the uncanny ability to convince home phones that they were really pay phones.

He has, however, denied cracking the NORAD (North American Air Defense) Command computer, a crack that was widely credited to him, and inspired the movie War Games.

Mitnick was also a champ at what hackers refer to as social engineering, gathering information simply by asking people for it. Many times the passwords he used to enter computer networks were provided by the systems administrators of those networks, who had been convinced that Mitnick had good reasons for needing the passwords.

The Great Bank Robbery: The year 1995 also marked the great Citibank heist, when Vladimir Levin, a graduate of St. Petersburg Tekhnologichesky University, convinced Citibank's computers to transfer $10 million from its customers' accounts to Levin's. Interpol caught up with him at Heathrow Airport and Citibank got most of the money back.

Viruses of destruction: The writers of the two worst e-mail viruses of the 20th century are not heralded as daring crackers. The writers of the LoveBug, which knocked out scores of computer networks last May, were traced to Manila's AMA Computer College, and the investigation sort of fizzled out from there.

Melissa, which stuck in April 1999 -- clobbering 300 companies and affecting more than 100,000 e-mail users within hours of its release -- handily gained a bit of notoriety for its creator, David Smith.

Script Kiddies: Perhaps you need a snappy name to get fame nowadays. In February 2000, a Canadian kid who went by the name MafiaBoy was arrested for launching a denial-of-service attack that brought down many of the Internet's largest sites.

MafiaBoy managed to cripple Amazon, eBay and Yahoo during the week of Feb. 6 and Feb. 14, 2000.

Despite the claims of his lawyer, Yan Romanowski, that "If (MafiaBoy) had used all his powers, he could have done unimaginable damage," it's widely agreed that MafiaBoy was neither ingenious or creative -- he simply ran a computer script that clogged networks full of garbage data.

MafiaBoy gained illegal access to 75 computers in 52 different networks and planted a DoS tool on them which he then activated and used to attack 11 Internet sites by sending up to 10,700 phony information requests in 10 seconds.

The white hats: And lest we forget, for every cracker who rummages around in systems for personal gain or fun, there's also a hacker who rummages in systems and comes back with something cool to share with the world.

Famous white-hat hackers include Richard Stallman, who founded the Free Software Foundation and promoted the idea that software should come complete with its source code; Steve Wozniak, who decided to build a computer because he couldn't afford one, and came up with the first Apple personal computer; and Linus Torvalds, who cobbled together the Linux kernel as a hobby.

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The 5 Dumbest Hacks of All Time Dumb Crooks of the Digital Age

5. Hacker for Hire

By all accounts, Eduard Lucian Mandru is a very clever hacker. His 2006 hack of the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) computer system went undetected for years, with the authorities having Mandru’s email address as their single clue. Mandru’s downfall and arrest in 2009, however, came about when he used the same email address on the résumé that he posted on numerous job boards.

4. Note to Self

20-year old Sayaka Fukuda had her iPhone stolen on the streets of New York City. The thief, Daquan Mathis, while enjoying his new iPhone took a picture of himself (dressed in the same clothes he wore during the mugging), which he then sent to his own email address. Unfortunately for Mathis, Fukuda’s iPhone email account could be accessed on the Internet (like almost every email account in the universe). Given his email address it was a simple matter to track Mathis down – made even simpler by the fact the police had his picture.

3. Samy is My Hero

Famous for his Samy Worm, Samy Kamkar was responsible for a virus-like attack that infected over 1 million MySpace accounts in 2006. Among other malicious effects was the ‘Samy is my hero’ addition to the MySpace homepage of each victim. As part of his obvious ego addiction, Samy went on to boast of his hacking feat in a blog post. Unfortunately for Samy, the blog contained a picture of him with a license plate in the background. Which was then used to track him down.

2. What Do You Want to Do Tonight, Brain?

Self proclaimed hacktivist Shahee Mirza and several associates defaced a Bangladesh military website, Rapid Action Battalion, with the message:

GOVERNMENT DOES NOT TAKE ANY STEP FOR ICT DEVELOPMENT. BUT PASSED A LAW ABOUT ANTI-CYBER CRIME. YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT IS THE CYBER SECURITY OR HOW TO PROTECT OWNSELF. LISTEN. HACKERS R NOT CRIMINAL. THEY R 10 TIME BETTER THAN YOUR EXPERT. WE ARE GINIOUS THAN YOU CAN'T THINK. DEFACED FROM BANGLADESH.

Unfortunately 21-year old Mirza also left the banner that clearly stated, “HACKED BY SHAHEE_MIRZA." Obviously not the “GINIOUS” he thought he was, Mirza may end up with 10 years in a Bangladesh federal prison. One can only imagine what the prisons are like in one of the poorest countries on earth.

1. You Can Get in Touch with Me At ...

Kelly Osborne (of Dancing with the Stars – no further comment) had her email account hacked. The hacker, wanting to not only look at all of her past emails as well as new ones, had Kelly’s emails forwarded to his personal email account. Hmmm... now how could someone possibly follow that trail?

And finally, one that's just flat out funny.

One clever hacker realized that some speed traps use cameras that automatically register your speed, take a picture of your license plate, and then use character recognition to translate your license plate number into something they can use as a lookup within the DMV database. With this in mind, he covered his front bumper with a banner that read,

(‘ZU 0666’, 0, 0); Drop Database Tablice; --

If the DMV photographs this this string of characters and feeds it into their database lookup it has a good chance of deleting all of the database records containing his actual license plate number, ZU 0666. This gets 10 out of 10 on the creativity scale.

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Today in Tech
5 worst digital security breaches of all time

Post by Sebastian Anthony: With yesterday's news of the PlayStation Network being hacked and the unceremonious accompaniment of millions of names, addresses, dates of birth, passwords, and possibly credit card details having potentially been stolen, the tech community's attention has yet again been focused on the tricky and vitally important topic of internet security.

Breaking in to computer networks and stealing data is not a new thing — it's been happening since the advent of computer networks — but as the number of people on the internet grows and more and more sensitive data is being stored by online services, the problem of data security becomes more important. These databases tend to be incredibly secure, but the fact is, your name, email address, and credit card details are worth real money to hackers and spammers, who'll do almost anything to get their hands on them.

While the PlayStation Network breach is one of the biggest in recent months, let's take a look at some others and see what they can teach us about protecting our online privacy and security.

1. Gawker Media — December 2010
One of the most popular targets for hackers is online forums and blogs. They're rarely secured to the same level as large, commercial websites, and they have the added bonus of upsetting a large number of vociferous blogging and commenting types.

The attack on Gawker Media exposed the email addresses and passwords of millions of commenters on popular blogs like Lifehacker, Gizmodo, and Jezebel. Beyond the breach itself, the main problem was that Gawker Media stored passwords in a format that was very easy for hackers to understand. Some users used the same passwords for email and Twitter, and it was only a matter of hours before hackers had hijacked their accounts and begun using them to send spam.

Using a modern browser like Chrome or Firefox and a password manager like LastPass almost completely mitigates the potential damage of such attacks.

2. T.J. Maxx and Marshalls — 2005 to 2007
In what was probably the largest theft of data ever, over 45 million credit and debit card numbers were stolen from off-price department stores T.J. Maxx and Marshalls. The hacker, Albert Gonzalez, was only caught in 2008; in 2010, he was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

Between 2005 and his arrest in 2008, Gonzales stole the details of over 170 million credit and debit card numbers, making him the most successful credit card thief of all time.

3. Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs — November 2007
Data is not only stored online; it can also be stored on CDs and DVDs, which can then be stolen or misplaced. In November 2007, the United Kingdom's Revenue & Customs service lost computer discs that contained the names, addresses, and National Insurance numbers of 25 million British citizens.

Fortunately, it's thought that the discs were simply lost in the mail — but even so, it's proof that highly technical online hacking isn't required to obtain large amounts of sensitive data.

The United States Department of Veterans Affairs made a similar gaffe in 2006, when a laptop containing the Social Security numbers of 26.5 million U.S. veterans was stolen.

4. Google and other Silicon Valley companies — mid-2009
At the beginning of last year, news emerged that — believe it or not — the Chinese government had engaged in a massive and unprecedented attack on Google, Yahoo, and dozens of other Silicon Valley companies. It was first announced that China was trying to gather information on Chinese human rights activists, but it soon became apparent that it was mainly an act of industrial espionage.

It's not known exactly what data was stolen from the American companies, but Google admitted that some of its intellectual property had been stolen and that it would soon cease operations in China.

The Chinese hackers exploited a weakness in an old version of Internet Explorer to gain access to Google's internal network — and if you haven't recently updated your web browser, you really should update it right now.

5. RSA Security — March 2011
The worst (and undoubtedly the most ironic) data breaches happen when security companies themselves get hacked. Kapersky and Symantec, developers of antivirus and security software, have been hacked multiple times — and in March 2011, one of the biggest players, RSA Security, had a sensitive and highly confidential internal database laid bare.

RSA's breach was significant because its technology is used to secure thousands of other systems, which hackers might now be able to access.

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The 6 Most Hilariously Stupid Criminal Excuses of All Time
By: Tracy V. April 14, 2012

If making fun of stupid criminals is a crime, then we plead guilty. We'll even do it in some laughably incompetent way so that we can become a list entry in one of our own articles.

Indeed, one of the deepest wells of comedy in the dumb criminal genre is the real yet incredibly implausible or outright insane excuses they make for their crimes. So, let's enjoy the tragic genius of the following criminal defenses ...

#6. I'm Not Drunk, But the Horse Is

Let's say you live in a rural area. It goes without saying you've drank an entire six pack, because it is mandated by the county and there's absolutely nothing else to do anyway. Presently, you get the urge to visit your sweetheart, but you don't have a car, and he or she isn't a member of your immediate family. However, there is a horse nearby. So what do you do? If you said "drunkenly steal that goddamn horse," then you are thinking like Tracy Nadine Ellenburg.

A concerned citizen of Six Mile, South Carolina, contacted police after spotting Ellenberg erratically drunk-riding the contraband stallion down the middle of Main Street (the citizen's ability to distinguish between drunken and sober horseback riding should have been immediately commended).

Ellenburg had parked her horse before police arrived, but the officer on scene was able to locate it anyway, because it was the only horse tied to a bench outside a convenience store.

The officer confronted Ellenburg, who stank of alcohol, swayed and slurred her defiant insistence that she was sober, which you may recognize as a level of drunkenness so spectacular that people mimic it when they are pretending to be drunk. Regardless, not only did Ellenburg deny any wrongdoing, she actually blamed the horse, which, if you remember from before, was stolen. She declared that the horse was drunk, not her, and therefore the horse was at fault for the erratic riding.

The police, not appreciating having witnessed one of the seven wonders of the drunken excuse world, cited Ellenburg for disorderly conduct.

#5. We're Not Stealing, We Thought Everything Was Free

A woman in St. Paul, Minnesota, was tucking her children into bed when she heard a noise somewhere in her house. Going downstairs to investigate, she spotted a man and a woman running full-tilt out the back door, like that one kid at sleepovers who refused to poop anywhere but at his own house. The woman chased after the intruders and found them loading bags of her stuff onto their bicycles, presumably because they had learned everything they knew about criminality from the evil baseball team in The Sandlot.

Via Minnesota.cbslocal.com
"No, officer, I have not taken 'all of the drugs in the world.' Why do you ask?"

They were thwarted hilariously when a neighbor blocked them in with his car and called the police. The thieves, Charles and Pernella Bull, had attempted to make off with a laptop, a desktop computer, a toolbox, the woman's purse and a few other odds and ends. On their bicycles. We cannot stress this enough.

When questioned, Mrs. Bull said that a friend had told her that the address was listed as a "free house" on Craigslist, which meant that the owners were moving out in a hurry, so anyone was free to just show up and take whatever they wanted. You may recognize this as the daffiest pile of bullshit in the history of lies told by anyone above the age of 4.

Mrs. Bull said she had called out to ask if anyone was there when she walked into the house (you know, the house with all the lights on and a purse sitting on the counter), but when no one answered, she figured it was vacant and starting loading up the bicycles. The police weren't able to find the alleged "free house" listing on Craigslist, most likely because at no point in the course of human history had it ever existed, so the Bulls were arrested.

#4. I'm Not a Bad Driver, It Was a Tarantula Attack

As Lee Solarski was tooling along one day, he crashed his car into both a mailbox and a pickup truck, as one does. Being a responsible citizen, he immediately drove the ballshits away, not realizing that a witness had written down his license plate number.

When the police tracked him down, Solarski explained that he'd crashed because his passenger had a tarantula in the car with them. The tarantula had gotten loose and was biting Solarski, causing him to lose control of the car during the attack. To his credit, we admit a rampaging tarantula would be enough of a reason to crash anything.

The police searched the car but didn't find the offending spider, which we figure came as a relief to whichever officer drew search-the-car-for-a-secret-tarantula duty. After a similarly thorough search of Solarski failed to produce any spider bites, he was arrested. So ... did he make up the spider story on the spot? Is that his go-to excuse? Does he really have a friend with a tarantula who he blames everything on? "Hey, honey, I see you've stumbled across the folder full of porn Steve's tarantula put on my computer."
Though that's actually not the worst vehicular-related crime excuse we've ever heard. A Cincinnati man walked out to his car one morning and was surprised to find a guy asleep inside without any pants on. The half-naked sleeper turned out to be Kim LeBlanc, who told police that he'd done drugs and was pretty sure a leprechaun had opened the car door and let him in. He offered no explanation as to why a leprechaun would have told him to wait inside a stranger's automobile, or where the aforementioned leprechaun had gone with his pants.

#3. I'm Not Drunk, I'm a Werewolf

Photos.com

It had been a quiet night at the Timber Ridge Campground in northern Ohio until Thomas Stroup hit the vodka a little too hard. Someone called the police, complaining that Stroup was in a drunken frenzy and was starting fights with people. He had even kicked a dog cage in his fury.

Deputies found Stroup passed out in his trailer, surrounded by swords and knives, which, along with throwing stars and a magnetic dartboard, are required to be placed in every odd-numbered unit in a trailer park. When they woke him up, Stroup only growled at them. Once he finally started talking, he spoke in a Russian accent and threatened to kill the deputy's cousin Keith, only the deputy didn't have a cousin named Keith, so instead of being flushed with terror, the threat just left everyone feeling confused.

After being unsuccessful in his attempt to intimidate the deputy, Stroup explained that a wolf had scratched him during a recent trip to Germany, so now whenever the moon was out, he felt compelled to prowl through the night and attack (and evidently kill guys named Keith).

Stroup also mentioned that he'd been arrested by German police during his trip for drinking too much and blacking out in public. His passport indicated that he had, in fact, been arrested in Germany, but the police wisely connected the dots and determined that, rather than getting scratched by a wolf and turning into a feral demon, Stroup had just drank too much and turned into an asshole.

#2. 103? Thought I Was Going 031

A worried driver called police when he saw another motorist yelling and waving a cigarette around while erratically changing lanes at high speed (if he had been waving a gun instead of a cigarette, everyone would've just kept driving). Responding officers clocked Matthew Cook doing 103 in a 60 mph zone, but Cook had an explanation: his dyslexia kept him from understanding the speedometer.

We should note here that dyslexia does not in fact keep a person from feeling the forces of acceleration or from looking out their goddamn windows and seeing that cars are blurring past them like the stars in hyperspace. Also, even if Cook had a numeric speedometer and was dyslexic with numbers, he would still know he was looking at three digits. Unless you are on a racetrack, on the Autobahn or in freaking space, you are driving too fast.

Regardless, Cook didn't have the chance to argue his claim, because his speedometer read like a dial, and the court didn't buy that dyslexia would make him unable to understand that he was burying the needle. Cook's license was revoked.

#1. It's Not a Crime, It's Method Acting

Detective Robert DiGiacomo was on the lookout for a suspect who started a fairly lame crime spree by stealing a bottle of water and face-punching a convenience store clerk. As DiGiacomo sat idling in his Chevy Impala, the passenger door opened and a man climbed in. Micah Calamosca, who would actually turn out to be the clerk-punching water bottle thief, then told DiGiacomo to get out of the car because he was totally stealing it.

When DiGiacomo finally stopped laughing and had a chance to wipe the tears of hilarity from his eyes, he pulled out his gun and arrested Calamosca. But Calamosca had a ready-made excuse: The movie The Dark Knight Rises was filming nearby.

Calamosca explained that he was involved in the filming of the latest Batman movie and that the script had called for him to steal the detective's vehicle. The fact that there was a staggering lack of cameras, film crew and Christian Bale anywhere near the scene of the carjacking made the story hard to believe, though, so Calamosca was hauled off to jail.

But even his excuse was a bit more plausible than that given by a guy who robbed a Belfast lingerie store, making off with bras, underwear, garter belts and stockings. At his trial, the man claimed that he didn't really remember what he was thinking during the robbery, but that Beho, his female elf character, might have had something to do with it.

He said he had been playing Shadowrun, a role-playing game set in a cyberpunk/magical future. His character, Beho, was an elven shaman who carried a Japanese sword, and the man claimed he had lost the ability to separate the fictional game world from reality. The judge didn't buy this, presumably because there is no quest in Shadowrun that requires you to go steal an armload of panties at knifepoint, even though that exact setup describes 70 percent of the games currently sold in Japan.

Read more: The 6 Most Hilariously Stupid Criminal Excuses of All Time | Cracked.com

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