People Share The Most Illegal Thing They’ve Ever Done And Gotten Away With

Have you ever done something that totally scared you out of your wits? It could be something like going on the world’s tallest roller coaster (there are quite a few you can attempt to go on if you haven’t already); trying that haunted house out at the behest of your best friend; or, it could be something a little bit more serious—a crime, an illegal act that could land you in a ton of trouble with the law.

Let’s talk about illegal actions. So, is there something you’ve been hiding that you would never confess to even your soul mate? There are a lot of people in the world who have done something illegal (a petty crime or something more serious) and gotten away with it. It could be that their crime was so small that it went unnoticed; or, it could also quite possibly be that they just got another chance because fate was on their side. Regardless of how people get away with it, not a lot of them want to confess to something that they’ve done which they shouldn’t have. It takes courage to fess up to something wrong that you’ve done, and all the respect goes out to the people who share their stories, big or small, with the world (eventually).

Now, are you wondering who these people could possibly be? If so, you’ve come to the right place. Below we share with you stories of those who have done something illegal, gotten away with it, and even lived to tell the tale.
40. I Ran A Credit Card Fraud Ring At The Age Of 12

When I was a young child, maybe 12, I ran a credit card fraud ring. Yes, that’s right a 12-year-old was head of a credit card theft organization. Now, this was a long time ago. Phones still had cords, the largest tv you could get was 36″. Gas was probably a dollar.

I don’t even remember if we had a microwave yet.

It all started one day while we were at TJ Max. This is a discount department store. The lady in front of me bought something on her credit card and they had a card imprinter which basically is a machine that has 3 pieces of carbon paper that you use to manually record the credit card.
After the lady signed the receipt they just threw the carbon paper in the trash. I remember thinking about how clearly you could read the numbers.

Being 12 and my only source of income was from a paper route that I had, money was always tight.

My friends were even worse off. We were at my buddy Ed’s house looking at a BMX type magazine just dreaming of owning the mongoose GT. Back in the day, this was the best bike you could get. 360-degree swivel neck, plastic mag rims, foot pegs, hand brakes the works. Man, they were over $500.
We talked about saving up to buy them but quickly realized that it would take us years to save that money as we spent money like it was going out of style. Then I noticed that the ad we were looking at took credit cards. A light went off in my head.

I know where I can get credit cards numbers!!!!

But how do we do this? It was summer and having a paper route I knew when families were on vacation due to them having stopped delivery of the paper. So rode my crappy huffy bike to the back of TJ Max and I found a trash bag full of carbon papers. I grabbed a few and headed home. We then decided which one of us sounded the oldest and ordered the bike over the phone. Adding on all kinds of options. A few days later it arrived at a family’s home who was on vacation.

That night we went and picked it up and put it together. This went on for some time. Almost all my friends had an awesome bike. We began to get stupid though. One guy had a fruit basket delivered to his house. We had Van Halen tickets left at will-call for us under another kids name who could drive. We were living the good life. Then my buddy Chuck wanted a bike. It was near the end of the summer. Family vacations were a little scarce. But one family was taking a vacation the next week. So we sprung into action like we had over a dozen times.

Ordered the bike had it delivered to the family that was on vacation. The day the bike arrived though was a bit different. As I delivered the afternoon paper, I saw the box was sitting on the front step. Great I thought. I peddled down the road continuing to deliver the newspapers. On the street, I saw a family friend sitting in a car. Oh, I forgot to mention, my dad was a part-time cop at the time. This family friend was a cop as well. I stopped by the car and said hello to ‘Les’ and peddled away.
On the way home I stopped at my buddy Chuck’s house and I told him the bike was there but the cops were watching the house.

So we wisely decided not to pick up the bike. The next day I came home from hanging out with my friends and there was a cop car in the drive. Not unusual as my dad was a cop and they stopped by all the time even when on duty. I walked into the house and there was Les. I knew I was screwed, but I going to try and deny it. Les told me that I had a nice bike, that he was thinking of buying one for his son. Where did I get it? I told him K-mart. Seemed plausible, Adults don’t know anything about bikes, I thought.

I had a paper route so a $69 bike from K-Mart was feasible. He told me that he knows that K-Mart doesn’t sell that type of bike. He then told me that they had been investigating a credit card theft ring in the area and several bikes matching the one I was riding were among the stolen merchandise. He then said he was going to leave and that my father was going to bring me to the station in a bit and they wanted to “talk” to me about this coincidence. Man, did I want Les to take me with him.

I thought I was not going to make to the police station. I’m talking real police brutality. (I joke about that and if you have been the victim of police brutality, I apologize)
So my dad tells me to get in the car and we leave. He is quiet at first and then he tells me one thing. ‘You better not f*cking lie to them!’ The worst car ride of my life. I go to the station I am in the back room and they ask me to write out what I know. I told them EVERYTHING. When I was done, I walked out of the back room and there were all my friends and their parents sitting on benches.

Every one of my friends was crying their eyes out.

We all got caught. Life was not fun for a while after that. I say we got away with it because none of us went to court. None of us had to suffer any ‘legal’ consequences. It was one of the few benefits of your dad being a well-liked cop.” Bob Dragolic
39. The Bank Just Happened To Give Him Fake Bills

“Going anonymous for my friend’s sake. This was in the US about 6 years ago when he was 17 years old.

When he was younger, he would counterfeit small denomination bills ($10s and $20s), go to shops, buy small items with the counterfeit bills, and get real change back.

Most of the time he’d dress up in a button-up shirt and a pair of slacks so that he looked presentable, and put a smile on his face so that people would think he was just an honest, friendly person, even though he was scamming them. One scam, in particular, was at the mall just before closing. It was a pretty populated mall, and there was a jewelry store attendant standing outside the jewelry store.
He said to the attendant, ‘I lost a bet with my friend, and I owe him $10, but all I have is this $20 bill.’ She didn’t know it was counterfeit, and she didn’t even look at it, because he was dressed nicely and smiled at her.

She walked into the jewelry store with him (plenty of surveillance cameras, mind you), and exchanged the counterfeit $20 for a real $10. My friend was $10 richer.
Another scam was pretty simple: he would order a takeout pizza, walk into the pizza place, pay for the pizza, and be about $10 – $15 richer, and get a free pizza out of it. Never got caught. Almost once, though. Before I tell that story, here’s how he made the bills:

He’d print them out on his normal inkjet printer at home, spray them with hairspray for texture, and wrinkle them up pretty good.

Voila. While the bill definitely wouldn’t pass any sort of close inspection, the smile on the face and general psychological trickery is what made the scam successful.
So, into the story of almost getting caught:

He walked into a gas station in shorts and a t-shirt (this was his first attempt at the scam, and the bill was noticeably smaller than it should’ve been). He mixed it in with another real bill and handed it to the cashier. He forgot to smile and dress nicely. She looked at the bills, looked at him, and said: ‘sorry, I can’t accept this, it looks like it’s fake.’
In a fake outrage, he said, ‘well I just got it from the bank! What should I do? Should I go back to the bank and tell them they gave me fake money?

He and the cashier both agreed that this was the best solution, and they were both ‘angry’ that the bank had given him counterfeit money.

How could the bank do such a thing?!” Anonymous
38. I Helped A Friend Escape From Jail

“I have to go anonymous on this one.

It is the year 1999.

I helped my friend/flatmate escape from jail.

We were in Egypt at the time, and were young and still in university. I am an Egyptian citizen, he, on the other hand, was a foreigner, and did not have a valid driving license.
For some stupid reason, he was driving his friend’s car and got heckled by a pedestrian (who pretended he got hit by the car to scare some cash from the driver, common practice in Egypt and some other countries I will not be mentioning that I have been to).

Anyway, my friend did not have any cash on him, minutes later the police came over and booked him. He managed to call me for help from someone’s cellphone.

That night I went over to the police station, with food for my friend. At that point, it was not my intent to help him escape. Anyhow, being an Egyptian, I know how to ‘grease someone’s hands’ to let the food and cigarettes in.
The soldier whom I bribed gave us a couple of minutes while he smoked a cigarette, and there was an open door at the end of the hall. My car is parked close by.

I told him, if you can run to that door, jump over the fence (a low cement fence), I will wait with my car in 2 minutes, and I will take you to the airport.

That is exactly what we did. Took him in my car, stopped by his place which was close by for not more than 30 seconds for his passport, and off to the airport.

I saw him once after that in his country of origin almost 10 years later.”
37. I Broke Into A Nuclear Launch Control System

“It was not illegal at the time, likely because no one believed it was doable.

It was prior to all the criminal fraud and abuse and computer trespass laws were passed. I was also a minor.

And yes: I was caught and ‘debriefed.’

I broke into a nuclear launch control system using a phreaking patch at a telephone switch I had gotten into and a 1200 baud Bell 202 modem which I built from discrete components, which will bracket the date for you as ‘before 1980.’ It was for a Minuteman III missile armed with a single W62 thermonuclear warhead (170 kiloton fusion device).
At the time, I just thought it was an IBM 360, and did it to better learn to write JCL and IBM 360 BAL.

Back in those days, they billed for CPU seconds to prevent people from monopolizing contested resources. Breaking into machines was no big deal, as long as you just looked, and never altered any data or programs belonging to someone else. The Air Force showed up at my house in under an hour, and made me tell them everything about it, and warned me to never try again. I think it helped that a number of my relatives were DOD, and my neighbor was a full bird colonel, and he liked me.

They took my modem.” Anonymous
36. I Took The SAT’s For Multiple People

“I got paid to take the SAT’s about 10–12 times for other people.

I’ve always been an exceptionally good test taker and when I was 17 to 19 I sort of perfected a system where I could pretend to be someone I was not and take the SAT’s for them even once taking the SAT’s as a girl despite being 6′5″ and clearly not female.

How I got away with it: I grew up in New England and when I was in high school I had a friend who worked part-time at the DMV. Back then if you got a new license they didn’t give it to you while you waited as they do now, they used to mail it to your home.

So in order to take the SAT’s I would take your birth certificate to the DMV when my friend was working and she would help me fill out the paperwork and get my photo taken. Then you would need to check your mail every day for a week to intercept the envelope from the DMV or else possibly have to explain to your parents why your license has my picture on it. Once we had the license, you would register for the SAT’s at a high school in a nearby town, usually across the state lines to make the chances of me being recognized really small.

In New England, there are hundreds of towns within short distances and the SAT is basically available every Saturday if you’re willing to drive 15–30 minutes.
After that it’s pretty simple, you pay me $300 and I just show up and fill out the little circles as if I was you and then knock out a 1400 or better, and you get into the school of your choice. Weirdly despite taking the SAT’s probably 15 times in high school I never got more than a 1530 even though I frequently scored 800 on the math. Despite getting a perfect math score 7–8 times and never below 770 and sometimes scored as high as 760 on the English.

Whenever I got a great score on the English I always got a 770 on the math.
The one time I took the test as a female was for a person named Christine and we simply made the license out as Chris which might not have worked if not for my friend since a typical DMV worker would have insisted you use the name on the birth certificate. I felt really scared when handing in that test because I had filled in the circle for female and my license said female despite me obviously being a male. It really wasn’t a big deal as I doubt many, if any, of the teachers administering the tests, were carefully examining the bubbles for the sex of the test taker.

This obviously wouldn’t work now with the amount of data they have computerized including your picture but back then I had no problems. I did see someone got arrested for this behavior a few years back, I think it was on 60 minutes but I feel pretty confident the statute of limitations has expired on my fraud.” Brian Baker
35. I Crashed My School’s Entire Server

“8 years ago, in high school, I hacked into the central server of my school and did real damage.

In informatics class, we had a network of computers with the main server. All of the computers were low-end machines, without hard-drives, configured to PXE boot from the main server.

Every student had their own account on the server.
From the first day, I started searching for ways to login as an admin. I never succeeded, at least not in the way with enough permissions, so I went for a bit of an extreme method.

One day, I asked my teacher to help me with a project I was working on and he accepted. After the class, I came in and handed him my USB flash drive. He plugged it into his workstation and then we discussed the ‘project’ I was working on. What he didn’t know was that there was a self-executable trojan I had infected USB drive with.

The trojan was encrypted so it bypassed his already weak antivirus and infected his workstation. Now it was just a matter of time until he tried to log in to the main server.
A few days later I already had the administrator credentials delivered by my trojan so I did log in to the main server. That server was a part of an internal school network. In that network was a central server. The central server was accessible with the same credentials…Needless to say, I got access to all classified school documents and prepared exams. I downloaded some and then crashed the server with malware.

For a whole school year, they never got the network running again. We had been at informatics classes, but the computers never worked again. They never caught me. As I heard, later on, their SysAdmin was an idiot, he thought that the problem was with his CPU so he replaced it…facepalm.” Anonymous
34. I Snuck Into Someone’s House For A First Aid Kit

“When I was 10 my friends and I used to ride all around our neighborhood on our bikes. One of my friends fell and cut the sh*t out of her leg when it was just the two of us. She was one of those people who just freezes up whenever there is any kind of injury involving blood, and we were like half a mile from either one of our houses.

One of our biggest rules was to always use the buddy system, so I didn’t feel ok leaving her to go get help. So, I crawled through the doggie door of a nearby house and unlocked it to let her in. We went into the bathroom and raided the cabinets for first aid supplies. Once she was all sorted out (and we helped ourselves to a drink and perhaps a little snack in the kitchen, feeling quite daring)) we cleaned up after ourselves and put everything back the way we found it. I re-locked the door and crawled out the way I came in.

It wasn’t until years later when I told somebody the story that I realized that we had left all the bloody paper towels and stuff in the trash. And there was a lot. Somebody is probably still confused to this day.” Emerson_Bigguns
33. We Dodged A Cop And Avoided A Speeding Ticket 

“Was in a car where a cop was trying to pull us over, but my friend evaded the cop in a residential neighborhood and we got away.

We were 16 at the time. It was night time. Basically, we were traveling around 50 mph in a 25, and a cop was going the opposite direction.

Immediately the cop flashes its lights, hooks a U-turn, and speeds after us. My buddy (who is an excellent driver) says something along the line of ‘f*ck that’ and speeds around a corner, and then quickly turns another corner, pulls into a semi-tight parking spot (from the front—was very impressive), shuts off the car and the lights, and then everyone in the car ducks. The cop drives right past us and turns a corner. My buddy immediately turns the car back on, pulls a U-turn, and we booked it the f*ck out of there. My buddy is a girl by the way.” demarius12
32. A Cop Helped Me Steal A Polished Stone

“I went home and grabbed a dolly, pulled the dolly about a mile through the wilderness with the heavy a*s block on it back to my truck.

As we were about to load the block we saw a police car come around the corner at the top of the hill. The people who were with me panicked and hid in the woods, but it was my truck, so if they ran the plates I would be in trouble anyway, so I just stood there. The officer parked next to me and asked what I was doing, so I told him that I was loading the block into my truck with the most innocent face I could muster. He looked around and I thought I was busted, then he asked if I needed help because it looked heavy.

We loaded it in the back, and after I thanked him for the help he walked off down the trail.” coltstrgj
31. I Got My Girlfriend’s Bully Fired From The Job

“There was an old hag at my girlfriend’s job who was bullying her. My girlfriend is only 20 and the other person was nearing 45. So for this b*tch to bully my girlfriend and have her come home crying every day was unacceptable. I had to get back at her, and I did. I work in information security so to say I know how to break into/break stuff is an understatement. So I hatched a plan.

This women also had a side business that was making cakes.
Long story short, I made sure she left my girlfriend alone.

I created a small botnet to knock down her website. With that down, I took aim at her personal life. I ended up getting into her email, her Facebook, and her Yelp. Once in, I snooped for info on her personal life. I eventually found it. I found that she was in the process of settling a deceptive business practices lawsuit and used that as my ammo. I forwarded this and other more ‘personal’ info to her employer. Within a week she was transferred to another location and eventually ended up being fired.” Anonymous
30. The Food Was Going To Waste, So We Decided To Do Something About It

“I once had a friend who worked in a very upscale gourmet foods store.

The place was huge, stocked with all sorts of imported canned delicacies, coffees, artisan cheeses, olives, oils, candies, and beverages. There was also a bakery and prepared foods counter.

The store had one of those awful policies about throwing away perfectly good food at the end of the day, rather than donating it to shelters. My friend told me how shocked he was to see workers hauling out bags of fresh bagels, sliced cheeses, homemade spreads, and even whole cakes to chuck them into the dumpster. Very upsetting.
My friend was put in charge of closing, so was given the key to the store.

A small group of us used to sneak in there after it had closed and all of the lights were out. We would enjoy extravagant feasts with all of the discarded food. Instead of throwing it away as directed, my friend would hide it in the break room to enjoy later. Nothing went to waste.

It’s a wonder that the security cameras never caught us.
It became a weekend tradition to camp out in the dark aisles of that amazing store, telling stories, playing card games, and enjoying only the best food and drink. Then the owners relocated, and it all came to an end.” HighDingyDoo
29. I Found A Way To Get Free Electricity

“I don’t always go anonymous, but this hasn’t hit the statute of limitations yet.

A couple of years ago, the local electricity monopoly decided to hike our rates to an unaffordably high price (it was summer and we lived in a desert). Needless to say, our power was cut off. There were some new homes being built down the road so one night, I went to the site and pulled an electric meter off one of the unfinished houses. I then installed it on my meter box (the power monopoly took the old meter since I know how to bypass the way they shut it off), put a literal mountain of yard stuff in the way, and locked the gate to the yard with a padlock.

We enjoyed free electricity until we moved out and I took the meter with me. I threw it away shortly thereafter because I didn’t need damning evidence that could incur a hefty fine and prison time.
You really can’t do this anymore as the meters have been replaced with new ones that could be accessed remotely.” Anonymous
28. I Stole Alcohol To Run A Free Bar At School

“I stole thousands of dollars worth of alcohol from a big chain store during my first year in college.

It all started one day when I was at a grocery store, which was part of a moderately sized chain, with a bunch of friends buying groceries and booze.

I placed a bottle of Jager in the cart, within my hat (one of the ones with a furry inside and ear flaps) by accident and forgot about it. It was never rung up. Then I thought, ‘Well, what if I could get away with it again?’ I created a system that allowed me to steal one or two bottles of alcohol every other day.
I’d dress well whenever I went and took my messenger bag with me, which was propped on the inside using empty water bottles to make it seem like it was already full, even though there was a huge gap.

As soon as I would enter, I would pick up a basket and place my hat in it. I’d then shop around getting random things, like milk, yogurt, and at some point a bottle of alcohol that I would place in my hat. Then when I’d reach the cereal aisle, which I thought was a blind spot for the cameras. To this day I don’t know if it was a blind spot or if no one bothered to watch me, but then I’d kneel down and slip my hat into the gap in my bag, and casually move along. I’d then check out making small talk with the cashiers to the point that we were all friendly, and walk out.

I did this every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for about 6 months. I used the alcohol I stole to run a free bar from my dorm room. I feel bad now about how much I cost the store, but at the time it was pretty cool for me and my friends. Karma also eventually caught up to me, when I tried doing it at another store when I was back home in Chicago and I got arrested.” -eDgAR-
27. I Stepped Into North Korea…Uninvited

“The most illegal I’ve done and gotten away with? Stepped into north Korea uninvited, with NK soldiers less than three meters away.

I was a teenage kid on a school day trip to the DMZ between North and South Koreas which included a visit to the cabin in which discussions took place, built on the very border itself, with a table right in the middle.
All I wanted was to take a picture of my friends in that room but the other side of the table was in North Korea. (What part of this didn’t I understand when they warned me a dozen times?) So I casually aimed for my spot until the hand of a US soldier grabbed my collar and put me straight where I should be.

They didn’t look amused, neither him nor the guys on the other end of the room. I wasn’t too much either, afterward, honestly.” Julien Durand
26. I Was Booked For Mail Fraud And Forgery

“As a dumb 17-year-old kid, I got away with mail fraud and forgery.

Several years ago I inherited a very rare collectible item worth tens of thousands of dollars. I immediately decided to sell it to help pay for college. The only problem was that there was no solid provenance to back up the authenticity of the piece. It had been in my family for several generations so there was no doubt in my mind that it was 100% real, but in order to sell it on the market, I needed some sort of provenance to back the piece.

That’s when I came up with the idea of creating a fake document to accompany the piece. I created the whole thing in Photoshop, even going as far as recreating the signatures that would have been present on a real copy of the document. I was even able to convince one of the most prominent auction houses in the country that the document was genuine. They assured me that they would be able to sell the item for insane money. Everything was going great; I was on cloud nine…until it came time for the auction to go live.
A couple of days after the auction began, I received a terrifying letter from a major NYC law firm representing the gentlemen whose signatures I had recreated/forged on the document.

They demanded that I tell them where I acquired the item and its accompanying document. I was scared sh$tless, so I decided to come clean and confess exactly what I had done.
Since I had tried to sell the item through an auction house and advertisements were distributed across the country through the federal mail-in catalogs, they informed me that I had committed mail fraud in addition to forgery. That’s a double felony, with potential consequences ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines to multiple years in prison…or both. I have never been so scared in my life.
The feeling that you get when realizing that your entire future could be ruined over one horrible decision is indescribable.

I begged for forgiveness and apologized more than I ever have in my life. Miraculously, the big man upstairs decided to give me a second chance. A few days after initial contact, the attorneys informed me that their clients decided to drop the case against me since I was just a teenager. I literally dropped to my knees and started crying tears of thankfulness and joy upon learning this information.
Needless to say, I learned my lesson and have never tried to cut corners again. It’s simply not worth the potential consequences. The criminal life is not for me!” Anonymous
25. My Site Was Powerful Enough To Shut Down A Library’s Server

“I made and monetized a site powerful enough to take down Xbox live games during a school half term

I was 15 at the time and a school friend told me about ‘DDOSing,’ how you could press a button and take down a person’s internet connection.

I was fascinated but also unapologetically curious. Basically, I found DOS/DDOSing is like asking 1000 people to get on one bus—but for websites—it just sends tons of packets of data until it crashes. I tried doing this from my home connection but it barely affected others.
So, I went on a website called hackforums and basically learned a ton about how to do it, but I couldn’t code so I scabbed as much free source code as possible. It was code for a website that you put ‘shells’ in (ammunition to take down connections). In a similar fashion, I scraped the web using various tools to find shells – you basically recruit the power from other servers.

I collected over 700 of these.
However, I needed to host this thing and it needed to be offshore for legal reasons, so I found this amazing site that let me host it for free somewhere in Europe.

My experience was only in designing stuff, so I designed an entire brand identity and called this site turbotea. Basically, super strong tea. Logo, everything. I posted my creation on the forum as 100% free to use. Within a few hours, I have over 100 members signed up. I asked if people could submit their own shells, too. More power. Within a day I had a few hundred users and this thing was catching on.

I then put a plea out for any people with coding skills to help.
I talked to someone named Mike over Skype and he helped make the web design look prettier. We decided to make a premium account type which basically meant you had priority of the network and more DDOS time. $5 each. By this time, I had over 1000 users and my host company kept frantically emailing me asking what exactly we were doing. I told them we made a stock photography website and advertised it, hence so many visitors. I’m amazed they couldn’t actually see the site!
Anyway, with this premium account, we could have literally made thousands over a few days.

However, at a mere $40 USD, we realized this had gone too far.

I read the forum and people had taken down their friends’ Xbox connections, targeted strangers who annoyed them during games. That was almost ok. However, then I saw people were using it to take down their school network. The final straw was somebody had taken down their local library network. I was disgusted.
I removed the site, which now had a few thousand members, and Mike and I agreed to not start it again. I put out a message to say it was no longer ethical to keep the site going and people were sad, but what was initially a small curiosity had become something extremely illegal and very unethical.

The next week I went back to school as if nothing happened and few people have heard this story since.

Sadly, this can never go on my CV.” Bob Dragolic
24. I Smuggled Invasive Turtles Into Canada In My Carry On Bag…

“I smuggled 2 turtles from China to Canada in my carry on bag.

Many years ago I went back to China for a visit. I had been very bored staying with my grandparents for that summer, so my mom decided to surprise me with a gift – 2 baby turtles from the morning market. It wasn’t exactly the entertainment I was hoping for but I did appreciate my mom’s effort for trying to cheer me up.

Eventually, I was due to fly from Beijing back to Toronto, stopping over at Vancouver. My mom stuffed the 2 turtles in a glass bowl the size of a basketball, into my Aritzia bag. ‘What you doing?’ I asked her. ‘Packing for you’ was the answer. Even as a kid I knew I wasn’t supposed to transfer live animals internationally. When I protested, my mom simply said, ‘if they find out, say you are very sorry and let them confiscate them, say they are gifts from your mom!’
And I just agreed. That was such a hectic and emotional day, saying goodbyes to all my family, arranging transportation to the airport, my face was covered with a mixture of tears, snot, and sweat constantly.

Somehow having 2 turtles in my bag didn’t even matter.

I passed the security in Beijing airport like a breeze. As soon as I got on the plane, I asked for some water, poured it in the glass bowl, dissolved some dry turtle food, and my reptile friends were swimming and feasting at 40,000 ft. When I got off the plane, I went straight to the washroom, dumped the water, cleaned the bowl and gave them a pat with paper towels.
Comes Vancouver airport, still no issue. I did get a little nervous watching my bag passing through X-ray, but I re-assured myself if busted I would apologize very, very sincerely.

Toronto airport was the tricky part. I had claimed my luggage – 2 giant suitcases. As I pushed them out, a sniffing dog came right to my way, his trainer kept on urging him “find it! find it!”. Again, the kind of stupidity associated only with youth saved me. As the dog eagerly sniffing my suitcases, I stayed remarkably calm and thought to myself: ‘HA, it’s in my CARRY ON bag!’
Later on, I found out the turtles are red-eared sliders and they are considered an invasive species in North America. Serious legal consequence is guaranteed if caught.” Anastasia Xu
23. I Was Caught For Doing Everything Underage People Do

This happened in 2007 when I was 20.

A girlfriend of mine (we will call her Ashley), and I were getting ready to head to a friends house when a friend of Ashley’s (we’ll call him John), called and asked for a ride to drop off some weed. She agreed since he offered to pay her for it. We had to drive to another state about an hour away. Ashley and I were drinking the entire time (so dumb, I know) and once we got to the meeting place the guy never arrived. We waited for about an hour before deciding to leave.
About 15 minutes after we left, we got pulled over by an undercover cop.

He said it was because we threw a cigarette out of the window and it was illegal to do that. At this point, I noticed that there were 2 undercover cop cars. The cop asked us to get out of the car and wanted our ID’s. I told the cop that my ID was in my purse in the car. He told me he would get it for me. My purse was a mess, and he grabbed my fake ID (the one stating that I was 21) instead of my real ID. He accepted it. Both cops were at our side now, and they told us that they needed to search the car.

Knowing that John had drugs, we had no idea what was going to happen.
Long story short, the dogs found the drugs. We were all taken to the police station where the cops told us that the guy John was selling the drugs to ‘snitched’ on him, which is why we really got pulled over. They told us they found alcohol in the car and gave us a breathalyzer. They didn’t tell us what the results were, but there was no way in hell that we were under the legal limit, considering we were underage.
They told us they would let us go because they were only after drugs.

They asked us one last time for our ID’s so they could document them, and the cop went through my purse again but this time found my real ID. He realized that I had a fake ID and told me that it could carry up to a 10-year sentence. After crying and apologizing for what seemed like hours (but was really about 5 minutes) he told me that he was a kid once too and understood. He took my fake ID and allowed us to go. Once Ashley and I got back to her car, we realized the dogs literally TORE her car apart, but they left the booze.” Erica Hockey
22. I Sold Drugs At 16

“In 1973 (I was 16), for six months, I was a quaalude (central system depressants) dealer.

I knew how to write prescriptions and I’d bought 1,000 blank scripts from a doctor in Brooklyn. I got up around noon and traveled around Manhattan filling prescriptions I’d written, usually 20 to 30 scripts; all filled at different drugstores.

At night, I’d go to Max’s Kansas City and sell the ’ludes. If you didn’t have the money, I’d write you a prescription for half the price. Business was good. I made about $500/day and spent it all.
One night, business wasn’t so good, and I departed Max’s and made my way to Nobody’s, on Bleecker Street. No business there, either, but Rick Wakeman and other members of Yes were at the bar, and I drank I couple of Beck’s with Mr.

Wakeman; I was incredulous when he told me they did no drugs, but were serious musicians, their music had caused me to think otherwise.

I left after a couple of hours and made a half-hearted attempt to sell my stash on Thompson Street.
A dude approached me and flashed a fake badge, declaring ‘Mod Squad,’ you’re busted! I knew immediately that this person was an a%$hole. Lucky for me, I kept my ’ludes and scripts in Ziploc bags. Suddenly, a real detective flashed his badge from across the street, and yelled ‘freeze.’

I acted like ‘Mr. Mod Squad’ had punched me in the stomach, doubled over, and dropped the contraband down the grating upon which I stood.

It appeared to the cop that ‘Mr. Mod Squad’ had attempted to rob me, and I did everything to reinforce that notion.
At the precinct, we were questioned separately; I was asked about drug dealing; ‘Mr. Mod Squad’ told them I was selling drugs. I asked them to search me; I know nothing about drugs, this guy just tried to rob me. He spent the night in jail and I went home. The next day, I went back to the grating on Thompson Street and retrieved my drugs and scripts with a fishing line.” Cameron J Williams
21. I Stole A Suit To Wear To My Grandad’s Funeral

“A couple of months ago, my grandfather passed.

Bless him. Old chap who lived a wonderful life. We don’t live in the same country, so I’ll admit we didn’t know each other that well. We met once a year or so. So, he passed, and a few of us flew to London to arrange the funeral, clear up his home, speak with lawyers, etc.

At the time, I was broke. Dead broke. I’m usually not, and I’m actually quite wealthy. However, with some cashflow issues (self-employed), I had absolutely no money. I didn’t have a fitting suit, and it’s safe to say that I needed one for this funeral.
The day approached, and I still didn’t have the money owed to me, so I had a rather massive problem.

The actual day came – still nothing. I went to the nearest big town (the funeral was at a small place in the south of the UK, so I went to Bournemouth).

To be honest, I don’t know what my plan was. I was hoping that some of my clients would pay me as their invoices were overdue, but there’s a lot of cruel people in the world, so that didn’t happen.
With the deadline approaching, I went into a store—nothing fancy, I think an M&S. I decided to take a chance. I was certain that even if I was busted, store managers/police officers would go easy on me, and I didn’t want to bury my granddad looking like an idiot.

I picked up a suit, went to the changing room, put it on, removed the tags and appeared as if nothing was wrong and I came into the store wearing it. I actually ended up buying something for £10 (a shirt or whatever) so I would walk out the store with an actual bag. Maybe that was dumb, but I had Googled ‘how to shoplift’ and that came up.
When I got out of the store, I walked away very quickly, got on the bus and disappeared. Everything was good, I made it to the funeral in time and felt good. I was representing myself looking sharp for my granddad.

Feeling bad afterward, I’ve donated 3 times the amount to a charity in the city. That made everything good again in my eyes.” Anonymous
20. A Joyride That Turned Into A Disaster

“Serbia, Southeast Europe. It was late night, the year was 2000-something. Me and my friend were roaming the streets and we were drunk like hell, possibly even high, I don’t remember. Somehow, this crazy idea came up: let’s steal a car and take it for a ride. We will return it afterward, of course, as we meant no harm. I reckon that in the USA they call it joyriding. For us, drunk and stupid Slavic teenagers, that seemed like good fun.

Since we had neither the tools nor the knowledge to unlock and wire-start cars, we proceeded to search for unlocked ones. You would be amazed to know how many people don’t lock their cars at night, especially if it’s an older type.

After about half an hour of searching, we found a car that was both unlocked and had keys in the ignition. I think it was a Renault or a Fiat Punto, or something like that. My friend hopped on the driver’s seat, and then he said: ‘You better do this because I don’t really know how to drive.’ We switched places and I started the car.

First gear, release clutch, boom. I released the clutch too quickly (I knew how to drive, but only in theory) and hit the car parked in front of us, and stalled afterward. I quickly started it again, put it into reverse, backed up (hitting the car behind), and gave it another try. This time I rolled the steering wheel full-left and gave some throttle while releasing the clutch.
The car accelerated violently, and before I had the time to straighten the steering wheel, we were off-road, driving through a park while the car was vibrating and jerking over uneven terrain. Being drunk and faded, everything happened too fast, and I had absolutely no control over the vehicle.

We drove over a couple of small, recently planted trees, and crashed into a concrete retaining wall. My chest literally got slammed into the steering wheel.
A moment of silence, then I hear yelling: “HEY MOTHERF&^%ERS!” (a Serbo-Croatian equivalent, of course). Adrenaline rushed, and we quickly jumped out of the car despite our injuries and started running like hell. A vigilante man (or car owner, who knows) started chasing us. I ran like never before for my f$cking life. We split, and I went into some old apartment building and hid inside the basement. I texted my friend to see if he was ok, and after we waited out for an hour or so, we met up.

Our injuries were light, only some chest pain. Both of us being stupid and being too hyped to go home and chill out, we went back to see the crime scene once again. We took off our jackets, met up with some of our friends to disguise as a group, and went for a stroll about a hundred meters from the scene. The place was swarming with cops. This was a small city, and they had nothing better to do than to investigate a joyride. We pretended to be passing by and gave it a quick look. Being minors and non-offenders, we know there was no way for them to trace us.

The car was damaged, but I think not totaled. In the end, it all ended up good. During those years I proceeded to break the law a couple more times, mostly with drugs and fist-fights. Now I am a completely different man, studying engineering in a good university, and not breaking the law anymore. But I still remember those days with a smile.” Anonymous
19. I Stole And Got The Biggest Rush

“When I worked for a grocery store they would have me put trash bags in a grocery cart and then put them in a dumpster right before my shift ended.

I stole a 20 rack by going on my normal routine but when I went to the back of the store (where all the booze was) I slipped the beer into a trash bag and threw it onto the pile. I then went to the break room bathrooms trash can and hid the beer under a fresh trash bag; once my shift was over I took out the special trash bag and put it in my backpack and left. I have never felt that type of rush before. It was incredible. NOT CONDONING STEALING but yeah it was tight.” Iamtried
18. I Went Into A Girl’s Computer To Impress Her

“I dropped out of college and went to a private school, I was studying computer programming, there was a smart hot girl in my class, simply the hottest in the school.

The teacher gave us a sheet of 10 exercises (10 programs to code), I did em all in no time while the other students were struggling with the first and the second programs. I sneaked into the that hot girl’s computer using Metasploit, she was struggling with the code, opened notepad and wrote: ‘Don’t do anything, I will write the rest of the programs for you.’ She was shocked and looking around to find who’s doing this, I gave her a wink. I completed all her exercises, she was happy and excited; a few days later she became my girlfriend (the relationship lasted 4 years).” Rachid Aachich
17. I Broke Into The School System To Have A Gaming Party

“At my first university, in the late nineties, they had just gotten blazing-fast T3 connection set up.

A friend and I had been spending free time in computer labs, playing with the security and finding a loophole here and there. We realized that logins would send a request to another (very slow) server to authenticate, determine if another computer was in use by that account, and then respond to allow the user to log in. It took about four seconds before being returned. After logging in, you couldn’t log into another system without being logged out of the first computer. Unless we discovered, you put the credentials into several computers at once, then hit return at the same time.

A neat trick when we had a guest or something, but not that useful in itself.
We started talking about it being a great setup for a massive LAN party, though. We contacted an online gaming club at a nearby university about having a LAN party between our two campuses but failed to get permission to do it at our campus. So we started planning. We waited late into the night to see if any of the labs weren’t patrolled by security. There was one we found in the Stats building with 35 high-end computers, well hidden from any patrolling security guards.

Next day, I hung out near the door in the morning, waiting for someone to come unlock the keypad to the door. Looking out of the side of my eye, I saw an arriving professor press the keypad and memorized it. We had a former TA among our group of friends, and they claimed to know the password to the alarm on the building, plus they were good friends with the lab tech for the campus in case some authorities got called.
Not done with the sneaky stuff yet, though. The computers ran Windows ‘98, which was okay, but we wanted to get the best performance possible, so we got together an image of Windows NT with all the games ready to install and hid it on the network accessed by the Stats computer lab.

We did a test run during the day when the lab was open to all students and figured out how to ghost the image we’d put together onto multiple computers. The computers automatically ghosted themselves at 5:00 AM each morning, we knew, so getting the computers back to normal would be done for us, erasing that evidence.
Finally, we scheduled a day for the big party. At 10 PM, we used the keypad to get in, turned off the alarm, propped the door open, and waited for our party to arrive. A good twelve people showed up promptly, so we went to work.

Typing in a login that belonged to a student who wasn’t there, we counted down from three and all pressed return on two computers each, logging in on most of the computers. Then we started ghosting them all from the networked image. That was the worst part of the plan. The ghosting had taken maybe fifteen minutes when we tested it before, but we only did it with one computer, not thinking that ghosting thirty-something computers all at once from a single networked image might cause a slowdown. It took almost two hours.
Everyone had arrived well before we were done ghosting the computers.

The location was secluded enough that we’d risked putting on some quiet music (I remember a lot of Scott Weiland that night), though we kept the lights turned off. Most of us just sat around chatting, waiting, hoping we hadn’t set off some door sensor alarm or something. Once the computers were set up, we messaged the nearby campus through ICQ that we were just about ready.

Then the party started. We had a blast and played until the sky started getting light. I’m surprised that the yelling wasn’t noticed by any passing security guards, as a few folks in the group got pretty vocal while playing.

It was the most fun I’ve ever had playing video games, and I thought a pretty fancy bit of hacking, though not much was with a computer. We cleaned everything up afterward and left. I doubt anybody ever knew.” Christopher Larson
16. They Wanted Me To Pay For The News, So I Built An App To Hack In For Free

“I built an iOS and Android app that could access The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA today articles for free. Then, I gave it to all my friends.

As a broke college student, I couldn’t afford newspaper subscriptions. Newspapers available online restricted access with paywalls for premium content or for going over the limit of free articles.

This upset me because the world was restricting access to knowledge based on financial means.
I looked up how to bypass those paywalls and found out you could Google Translate an article from any language to English and get access to the full article. This got me free access, but it was an annoying process for reading multiple articles.

I decided to build a Java web app that parsed the home page of newspaper websites for basic article information and presented them in a way so that it wasn’t much different than looking at the websites themselves. When you clicked on a title it would take the article URL and combine it with a Google Translate URL to create a link that would take you to the “translated” page on Google Translate.

Because I wanted to do this on the go, I ended up building an Android app with the same logic and later an iOS one too. When I learned how to make API calls, I built a LAMP backend that would scrape the sites every hour and update the apps with the new information.

This decreased loading time dramatically and created a good experience for people who wanted to access newspapers for free.
Because I wanted my broke college friends to also have access to the great knowledge provided by newspapers, I decided to give a bunch of them it for free.

We all enjoyed free subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today for about a year before I decided I didn’t have the time to keep up with changing websites.” Lukas Carvajal
15. We Would Steal Full Shopping Carts From People At The Grocery Store

“Not strictly illegal but surely annoying for many.

Me and my roommate had this weird idea of fun. We used to go to the supermarket, look around for people leaving their full trolley unattended, take the trolleys to checkout, PAY FOR ALL THE STUFF and challenge ourselves to use everything we bought. Another rule of the game was not to remove anything from the trolley.

Results: We had to use tampons to mop floors, make cocktails from so-called healthy aloe vera juice, use its measuring cups to measure shots, eat baby food in our full adulthood, use women deodorant and be cool about it.
Slowly, we got perfect at profiling shoppers in the supermarket and were able to pick the trolleys that would potentially suit best to our needs.

And it indeed worked out great most of the times. It was a great learning experience. We learned improvisation, using resources in best possible ways, saved hundreds of shopping hours that we used for getting drunk and lastly legal ways of stealing.” Rasneet Singh
14. We Stole A Boat And Then Got Stuck Mid Sea 

“I stole a Zodiac boat, f*cked it up, tried to cover up the whole thing, f*cked that up as well…

We are three friends. One is a big guy, has funky hair, rings, and tattoos. He stabbed someone before. Oh, we’re 16 and 17 years old by the way.

The other is short, muscular, smokes drugs and cigarettes, has some family problems. Well, both did. I had none of that. Was clean, and would never be considered a ‘thief’ by anyone… Until then.
They were drunk, and we decided to steal a Zodiac, we had done it before, no major problems, what’s to keep us from stealing another one? Right.

Anyway, we managed to get out of the mini-marina, with the stolen boat, slowly, without notifying the night-time guardian and go off in a little adventure. We start to get away from the club, which is at the edge of the island.

It’s around 2 A.M. by the way, this is our third time that night that we are stealing the boat after dropping off some others.
The motor pronounces a weird sound, trrrrrrrraackkk. Sh$t. What was that? Nothing, of course, keep going. There is another small island not too far off our island, it’s actually pretty close. It’s extremely small, there is only one house on it, lots of dogs, barking at us, as we get closer. I try to steer away, but the short tough guy is drunk and has a grip stronger than I imagine. Guess, we’re going there anyway…

There are two wharves here.

As we get closer to the wharf on the right side, I can see the ‘FORBIDDEN’ and ‘DO NOT TRESPASS’ markings on the wharves (well, graffiti). And then, I can see a blue f%cking rope connecting the wharves! Literally, a nearly invisible rope, it’s blue, it’s low but tight and if we didn’t see it, the motor could be caught and we could be left on that island as dog meal.
So, let me give you the sitting plan: Short muscle guy is on the back, driving. I stand next to him. The big guy is sitting on top of the boat (the tip), so we don’t bounce too much in the tides.

Suddenly, the motor stops. This isn’t normally scary for us, since it happens all the time, every 5 minutes or so since we are using a paper towel as the key…However, we are getting closer to the wharf on the left and there are dogs on it barking at us. I swear this is real. The tough guy screams my name and literally hugs me, the huge guy also tries to distance himself; the dogs and I shout at the muscle guy to start the engine.
Now, remember they are both drunk, and here’s the conversation:

Big guy: ‘F$%^*&CK (we aren’t American or English, so in my language, it is much more pronounced and funnier)

Short guy: *shouting my name*

Me: ‘F%ck off and get the motor working you absolute f$cking moron!’
So he starts the engine at first try! That’s lucky.

We get away. And we return to the club, right? Nope… The short, drunk, muscle guy whispers into my ear: ‘Watch, I will drop him,’ pointing to the huge guy sitting on top of the tip of the boat. He starts making crazy maneuvers, at top speed. The big guy is shouting and they are both really drunk so I try to get the grip of the motor before someone dies, but I can’t. Suddenly, the short guy, while going top speed, tries to break the boat to the left aaaaaaand at that moment, another ttrrrrraaaaacckk and suddenly the f^cking motor is not in the water anymore, but it is in the air, sideways…side f#cking ways.

The blades are dangerously exposed and are still turning for a brief moment before my friends jerk away and then the motor drops into the sea, the only thing holding it is the cord.
My huge friend, panicking also grabs the cord and then tries to pull it and at that moment, we f*11ck up majorly, the cord is out of the water. Problem is, the motor is gone… Now, we are left in the sea, at around 2 A.M. and can’t move.  Panic surrounds us all, we literally lost someone’s motor after stealing it for a ride. We phone our friends, who are in the club, waiting for us.

The girls are worried, they say they will tell their parents, we say no. There is another guy, who is a close friend at the club and we beg him to rescue us. He agrees. He asks us for a bottle of Vodka (I know, what an a%^hole) and a pair of new flippers before he agrees to save our lives, by the way.
So, how does he come?

By stealing another boat! Why not!

The one he steals is much smaller and after 15 minutes, he is able to start the engine and find us in the middle of the sea with our iPhone flashlights open.

We try to move by tying the boats up but whenever he tries to move, his little boat turns. So we make small gains towards our island but it is impossible. We try tying the boats in numerous ways. We try to hit his boat towards ours, bumping us back to the island but to no avail, our boat is much bigger than his.
And then, it happens. HE IS OUT OF GAS. What the f&ck do we do now. We are in the middle of the sea. Two boats. One without a motor, one with a motor but without gas. The short guy is in the zodiac boat and says we can just transfer the gas from the bigger boat to the other’s gas depot.

We have a huge one which is very full, so we are good.

Nope, turns out, we can’t open the gas nozzle. So we are desperately calling other people, begging for mercy, for help. Then I come up with the idea of rowing. We had two paddles on the boat so the big guy and I use them to row not only our boat but our friend’s as well.
Eventually, we slowly approach the wharf of the club and the short guy gets off first. We remembered there was a camera next to the wharf so he gets around it and puts another wet paper towel on it as if we are some organized crime group.

We tie the rope just like we found it to the exact same place and assemble the boats as we found them. One by one we get off and then get out of the club using an alternative exit (jumping the side wall).

I stay at my short muscular friend’s house that night and when I wake up, he is talking to his mother who confronted him about the whole thing. He is denying everything but his mother tells him we were spotted on camera! Right…we blocked the camera after we came back but we didn’t do that before we stole it…Very smart.

Anyways, we learn that the Head of the club prevented the captain of the boat from informing the police and because everyone knows each other in the club, and we could settle this internally. The police never get involved, the guy asked for $700 from each of us and we are happy we don’t face any jail time.” Anonymous
13. I Stole From A Man And Then Worked For Him Years Later…

“I broke into a house where I knew the owner was very well off. I stole a safe from this house, which required removing it from the wall. We cut the wall out so I guess technically we stole the wall too.

We knew from his daughter that the family was out of town for the weekend, and knew there was a large sum of money inside the safe.

We took the safe and all the guns in the house along with a Nintendo 64, this was long ago. We then took the safe to a garage and eventually got inside. In the safe were just under 20 thousand dollars, another handgun, and miscellaneous papers. We burned all the papers and sunk the safe in a lake. The guns we traded for drugs, the money we divided 4 ways giving his daughter some of the money.

Hers was the 4th share, and as she wasn’t with us, not an equal share.
We then proceeded to party like rockstars for about a week or two, pretty amazing how fast 3 young idiots can blow through 15 thousand dollars.

One of us, “P”, had a big mouth and told everyone what he did. P got busted and was sent to prison for 3 to 7 years, I haven’t seen him since. He kept his mouth shut and didn’t rat. So “K” and I never got caught. I believe K still has the same 64.
I ended up working for the man years later, and he knew I was friends with P, he asked if I knew what had happened and if I knew anything about it.

Turns out the safe itself was more valuable to him than the contents, it had been his great grandfather’s and was an heirloom.

I felt like sh*t and had no way of making it right, and apologizing wasn’t an option. I think he suspected I had been involved, but he treated me well the 2 years I worked with him. He passed away a few years ago.
I have never stolen anything since I started working for him. I learned that there is more to things than just money. At that time we knew we wouldn’t really hurt him financially but never thought of anything more than that.

Now I am still a part-time outlaw, but my crimes are all victimless. I work hard and could never take something someone else worked for. I have much respect for the police who help keep us safe, and I have zero tolerance for thieves as hypocritical as that is, it’s who I am.
I have done other things that would have gotten me more time, and have done more time than I would have gotten for that, but nothing that has ever made me feel so petty and low.” Anonymous
12. I Got Smuggled Into The US Military Armory 

“LSD was a thing my friend and I would do together quite often as we were pushing the limits of our new found freedom of living away from our parents and going to school together.

He lived across the street and quickly we became friends.

One night we took acid and were up all night tripping, it hadn’t worn off yet and he had to go to work… driving as a carrier. I can’t quite remember how I ended up in the van he drove, but we were having a good time laughing and messing with people’s packages. We found old gold from a dentist shipping pulled teeth, read some holiday cards, and generally were fools. I rode with him and the next stop coming up was a military armory. The brilliant idea of staying in the van, covering myself with mail bags, and getting ‘smuggled’ in sounded like a good idea at the time.

It was winter in Minnesota and very cold so standing and waiting a block away just didn’t even strike us, besides he said I had to see the inside with driverless vehicles (carrying explosives) and the fortified buildings sounded cool. He said he just had to stop at security and he’d just get waved in any way, but to be safe I hid.
We proceeded in and he stopped at the gate as usual, and we were on our way. I popped up to see these robot vehicles, it was 1990 so that seemed quite advanced. The place was pretty interesting and I did see the vehicles, with no windshields, driving around to these thick-walled concrete buildings.

Now for those of you who took blotter acid in the late 1980’s/early ‘90’s, there were times that the impurities would produce the “acid farts” and I was getting them bad. We were getting gassed out and laughing very hard. I guess him laughing his a*s off supposedly alone might have got the attention of security, who did stop him. I quickly got hidden under the bags of envelopes and parcels just in time, the van was signaled to stop and he did. At that moment a silent but deadly “acid fart” came and passed (pardon the pun) and the van door was opened.

I knew it had to just reek and was freaking out as this was not in the plan and I’m sure, a big crime for both of us. I heard him talking to the guard and knew the guy was going to look in so I stayed as still as possible. My guess is that the poor guard took one breath and about gagged…and I hear the doors sliders start to go, and….slam! The door was shut. The guy barely looked inside as it had to be paint peeling bad smelling inside. I heard some chatter and I heard ‘on your way’ or something similar and we drove out, both laughing and dying a little at the same time.

So that’s how I got smuggled in and out of a US military armory.

Saved by noxious gas!” Anonymous
11. A Cop Didn’t Bust Me For Dealing Drugs, And I Still Don’t Know Why 

“I dealt a lot of drugs during my early college years in Florida during the 1970s. I was an extremely inexperienced white kid from an upper-middle-class background, and it was only because law enforcement techniques – such as federal crime databases and effective undercover operations techniques – weren’t as advanced as they are today that I never got caught.
I rarely got ripped off, either, which was amazing, given my ingenuousness.

Also helping my case was the fact that most of the bad guys and intensive drug-fighting action was concentrated on smuggling drugs, then taking place at epidemic-level proportions in Southern Florida 200 miles to the south.

Other factors that helped were my extreme honesty, fairness and ideological commitment to the drug culture, especially with regard to psychedelics. I was a naturally friendly guy, very fun-loving and non-confrontational.
One night, I was doing a big deal involving several tens of pounds of marijuana. This wasn’t the 20+% THC you find grown stateside nowadays, but imported from Colombia that sold for about $30/oz.

The deal was a little outside my comfort zone, involving people I barely knew.

I remember getting very stoned in advance to deal with the stress (hugely bad idea). As the exchange unfolded, I noticed a very conventional-looking woman, almost suburban in appearance and very out of place, standing in the background as we proceeded through the negotiations. She kept staring at me in a very motherly, caring way that confused me utterly. I could distinctly tell she felt sorry for me, although under the circumstances of a drug deal going well and from which I would extract a big financial profit it was hard to understand exactly why. Her sorrowful gaze continued until we wrapped up the deal and left.

Shortly after that, a big sweep came through and, one by one, everyone at my level in the local drug culture and above was getting picked up. It was very systematic and it was clear all the local operations had been infiltrated and compromised by law enforcement for some time.

I waited in agony for my turn to be busted but it never happened. There was very much a code in place during that period – a sense of honor that disappeared from the scene thereafter – and I am pretty sure that almost no-one “ratted” on me.
It began to dawn on me that somehow I had eluded the net.

About three months later, still on my best low-key behavior, I was driving along a highway where traffic had slowed to a near-stop while police directed cars around a minor accident.

As I briefly stopped at the instruction of a police sergeant, I suddenly realized it was the same woman who had been observing me sympathetically during the drug deal some months before! Our eyes locked, I froze in total terror (actually, nearly bolting from the vehicle), and it was evident we had recognized each other!!
Then, slowly, the same smile and concerned look I had seen during the deal crossed her face.

She raised a finger, shook it from side to side as if admonishing a naughty child, and clearly mouthed the words, ‘No more, okay?’ I nodded, my car rolled past her and we never met again.

I did stop dealing after that, but I know with absolute certainty that she had made the decision that night to selectively not bust me. I have no idea exactly why, but clearly she possessed some odd sense of protectiveness towards me that saved me from a lengthy prison sentence.” Anonymous
10. He Vandalized Someone’s Car… For A Very Good Reason

“When I was a teenager, my Labrador got out of the yard and I finally found him at the pound with a bullet in his shoulder.

I had to put him down. I inadvertently found out who did it. I spray painted his Corvette. After he got it repainted, I did it again.

Editing for clarity. This was a small town in the late 70’s, I did tell the cops when he was shot but we didn’t know by who, they said they could do nothing. As far as I remember even when I found out who did it they said they couldn’t help me. I found out who did it because my sister went to a party and a guy there was talking about a dog he shot.

He lived in the same block where animal control picked my injured dog up. Of course, I took my dog to the vet, but as a poor 16-year-old, I did not have the funds needed for surgery. If I recall correctly it was $400, which would have been a small fortune for me. I had the vet put him down. He was a sweet lab, I bawled my eyes out for weeks.
One of the local cops was a family friend, he put 2 and 2 together, and after the second paint job, he stopped by my work and mentioned what happened to this guys car, and looked at me and said he hoped it wouldn’t happen again.

I took the hint and left him alone after that. This all happened over 40 years ago, but to the best of my recollection, that is what happened.” imakemore
9. I Stole A Painting From A Bank

“Years ago when I was in the Air Force, I was stationed at a base adjacent to a medium-sized town. I moved off base into a house and had to learn the ins and outs of paying utility bills. I was 19 years old (63 now).

n this town, one of those bills was paid at City Hall, right downtown. I parked my car out front, went in to set up my account and was admiring the various local artist paintings on the wall and one in particular—a framed and matted watercolor about 24 x 36, caught my eye and a plan instantly presented itself to me.

The building had a mid-building staircase that opened into a side alley. I parked my car (a 1972 Celica hatchback) in the alley by the staircase and popped the hatchback, leaving it almost closed. I went back in, waited till the coast was clear, took the painting off the wall, down the stairs, out to my car, laid it in the back, closed the hatchback and took off.
I didn’t hang the painting immediately. I put it between my mattress and box springs in case I’d been seen and the police came by—which they never did. I kept the painting for probably 30 years and eventually sold it at a yard sale.

Looking back at the 19-year-old version of myself, I’m aghast at all I put at risk: reputation, criminal record and an Air Force career I loved for the 8 years I was in. My only hope is that the artist found some satisfaction in the fact that someone liked his or her work enough to steal it. If you’re that artist and you happen to read this—sorry I stole your painting!” Mike Yeley
8. I Peed In The Bushes, Got Away With It, But Broke The Law

“A few years ago we want on vacation to Greece, but that’s not where I committed my coup de grace.

It was actually on the trip home. We were at the Macedonian-Greek border, in no man’s land. I had to use the bathroom, a rarity in and of itself since I’m like a camel, but this was a long trip after all.

The problem? They charged us €5 to go to the bathroom. I repeat, five f*cking Euros. Do you know how much money that is converted to dinar? Almost 600 dinars, enough to buy two small pizzas.
(Okay, it was probably about <550 at the time, but still.)

Now, make no mistake, my parents weren’t about to make me hold it in for a measly (well, relatively) five Euros.

It wasn’t their indignation that sparked the criminality in me, but squarely my own.

I made my choice: I’d rather be locked up, imprisoned, in the slammer, a political prisoner to be bargained away than see my hard-earned five Euros (well, my parent’s hard-earned five Euros) line the pockets of the European bourgeois elite. Or whoever works in no man’s land, I’m not sure.
With a bold heart, I snuck off to a secluded area behind the souvenir shop/supermarket. It was at night, bushes all around me, nobody could see me, or so I thought. Let’s just say I took a royal p*ss on the law of the land, man.

Literally.

But, as I was finishing up, I heard a loud whistle. Oh sh*t, I thought, I have to get out of here. With my package packaged back up, I ran away in whatever I judged to be the opposite direction of where I heard the whistle come from.
Realistically, I wasn’t sure if that whistle was meant for me, but I wasn’t about to wait around and see. As I reached a more well-lit area, I recalled watching an ID: Identification Discovery program on fugitives and, having learned a few tricks myself, took my coat off and instead carried it in my arms.

Satisfied that this would throw La Migra off my track, I went to buy a bag of Oreos in the shop I mentioned earlier.

And I got away with it too, €5 I could have spent on exercising a civil right spent on a delicious snack instead. Pfft, and they say crime doesn’t pay.” Najed Sidaric
7. We Interfered With United States’ Mail

“I think the statute of limitations has run out on this one. Just in case, names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Some high school friends and I were ‘booze cruising’ our rural roads one night. I was driving and not drinking.

This was in the early 1980s, before MADD and the big push to remove alcohol imbibing from vehicles.

We were stopped for a potty break when my friend Mary decides she has to have a tractor shaped mailbox she spotted up the road. Her boyfriend Dave kicks it off the post it was attached to and puts it into the trunk of my car. The drunken duo was happily making out in the back seat when I spot red and blue lights flashing in the rearview mirror. Damn!
I pull over. The people in the back were jamming their open beer cans into the crease between the seats when the officer walks up and says, ‘That is really going to smell horrible tomorrow kids.

You probably don’t want to do that.’ He was a really nice guy.

He has me get into his police car, runs my plates, etc. We had a conversation about the car I owned. It was an Olds’ 98 Regency, a big luxury car. Strange car for a high school girl. ‘It had a couple hundred thousand miles.’ I told him, ‘That is how I could afford to buy it. My dad put a new engine in it for me.’ Anyway…
The officer has us take all the beer from inside the car and empty it onto the road. Then he says, ‘I’d like to see what’s in the trunk.’ Umm…yeah, what’s in the trunk is a tractor load of trouble that I do NOT want this nice man to see.

I asked him, ‘Do I have to open my trunk?’ He replies, ‘No, but I can get a search warrant and then you would be forced to open the trunk.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not going to open the trunk unless you get the search warrant.’ He was very surprised I was not cooperating, we had been getting along so well. He tried to talk me into opening it, but I held my ground.
Another officer showed up, they made me sit in the police car while they talked privately. I was heartened when I heard other officers on the car’s two-way radio wondering where my nice officer was.

They were waiting for him to join them for a late supper.

They eventually let us go after writing us up for underage possession of alcohol.

I made my fourteen-year-old brother go with me to return the mailbox the next day. As he took it from the trunk we realized that it contained mail. We had committed a federal offense by interfering with the United States Mail!

(My brother still gives me crap for making him an accessory after the fact to a federal offense.)
We paid our underage drinking fines and we all learned a valuable lesson: Don’t open your trunk for the police unless they have a search warrant! Oh, and don’t steal, don’t drink when you are underage, don’t commit federal mail crimes and dried beer does make cloth car seats smell nasty.” Lisa Groeneweg
6. I Made Thousands Selling Drugs In My Teens

“From the age 17 to 20 I made about £30,000 selling drugs to people in my school.

It started when my boyfriend at the time asked me to pick up from the dealer because he was busy cooking so I went out to the street, waited for the driver and got in. I didn’t try to make it seem like I knew what I was doing but I wasn’t timid or shy either. We just made a bit of small talk about how this was my first time picking up, and how it compared in reality to film and TV. Over the next fortnight, I bought coke from him about seven times and we had short conversations about the managerial hierarchy, the supply chain, pricing strategy, competition, his wages, and even his personal life.

I asked these things out of curiosity because I was studying the sciences and economics so it was all very interesting to me but in doing so I inadvertently trained myself as an apprentice drug dealer. Initially, I was buying from him and a few other dealers and reselling to my friends with a marginal price markup to cover the cost of my time. The rumors started spreading that I was selling drugs in school so I cut them all off immediately because I couldn’t risk getting caught. A few months later invested in 100g of 65%–70% pure powder at just under £4000 from my 18th birthday money.

Most dealers would cut that to 200g of 30% purity and sell it for £40/g, thus a 50% profit margin. However, I refused to cut it because, for one, I thought it was unethical, and two, I had no idea what to cut it with. Within a month week the whole stock had been sold for £6000, not quite double, but enough for another 100g bag, and a car.
This was becoming a full-time job but since I grew up in a white (British) middle-class area and went to a grammar school, I never considered myself to be a ‘drug dealer’. All the dealers I met wore joggers and The North Face, but I wore shirts and trousers.

This allowed me to exploit the market of sheepish teenagers who found me approachable and friendly, eventually, they would stop buying from their other dealers who intimidated them, and only from me which meant I was able to choose whatever price I wanted and they would pay.
When I was 19 I’d made £20,000 and thought I’d stop, but it was the start of summer and everyone was increasing their hours in work so they had more disposable income, so I bought a bit more stock with money that wasn’t invested or stashed away and made the final £1o,000 over that summer, then went back to work for minimum wage in a pub.

It’s much more fun working 12 hours shifts in a pub than driving around the city center at 4 am having drunken, drugged up teenagers get in your car.” Anonymous
5. I Became A Book Thief At The Age Of 8 

“In elementary school, I was a huge fan of the book series The Boxcar Children. I became obsessed with the series in first grade, and I continued reading it until about fifth grade.

In fourth grade, we were assigned reading time and had to choose a book; of course, I immediately chose one of the Boxcar Children books as my reading book. But the thing is, by then I had most likely outgrown the series, and the books were too easy for me now.

The teacher, who I’ll call Ms. V, called me up to her desk and told me that the book was too easy for me and that I needed to choose another book.
Being the petty kid I was, I was angry at her for trying to undermine my reading time of my favorite series. So I set a plan.

Ms. V had a library, you see. There were lots of different books and she told me to choose one of them. So I go and see what books there are, and lo and behold I see multiple books of the Boxcar Children series; and some books in the series that I had never read before.

So began my career as a book thief. I would tell Ms. V that I had a new book and would show her one, and she would be satisfied; but I would have hidden a Boxcar Children book in my backpack, waiting to be taken home to be read.

I eventually grew guilty after I took home about 7 books. I was planning to return them, but the thing was, Ms. V was notorious for having a fierce temper and was feared by many students. So I hid the books in my bookshelf, and when my family moved, it was too late to return them.

I still see the books whenever I look at my bookshelf now, and I’m tempted to chuck the books in a donation event somewhere. Hopefully, they will find an owner that won’t question why a teacher’s name is written on the backs of the books.” Beatrice Kim
4. I Stole $14,000 From Strangers 

“I needed some quick money for some important stuff: CS: GO skins, Steam games, a new SSD. So I made 6 Gmail accounts real quick. I then proceeded to set up and verify a PayPal for each of these. I then posted on around 40 different cities, from 2 of the emails.

I listed a fake iPhone 6s for sale, $200. I said in the post ‘shipping only.’ This greatly narrowed the responses to around 30 a day, but I found many a gullible soul willing to send me $200 for the phone of their dreams. I racked up the cash on 2 of the accounts for about 5 days. I estimate I scammed about 90 people. Some I asked for half up front, half on delivery if they seemed hesitant. ($100 is better than nothing).
Once people started asking where their phone was, I deleted the two email accounts, and transferred all the money to the third PayPal, then the fourth, fifth, and sixth, deleting the accounts behind me.

At that point, I made a new Steam account, bought CS: GO, and purchased about $12,500 worth of expensive knife and gun skins (around $200 to $400 for each skin). Later on, when I turned 18 (about 5 months later), I created a legitimate PayPal, with my real email, and used a CS: GO site to cash out my skins for about $11,200 into my PayPal.
This has greatly helped me in college with online expenses. However, I will never forget the emails I got from people realizing they had been scammed (before I deleted the emails). War veterans cussing me out for stealing their money from the govt.

for disability; mothers pleading for the money back for their family; parents who wanted to give their child a new phone, only to have their saving snatched away by a greedy teen. This taught me that all actions have consequences, and you should always be prepared to either face them or find the strength to ignore them. I am anonymous for this.” Anonymous
3. I Stole A Video Game

“I was a kid living with a stepdad that could never hold down a job, and my mom would always have to go and do all the work while he stayed home and watched TV.

He was the sort of guy who would send mixed messages, treat you like crap, and beat you, and then get mad when you were afraid he’d beat you or be unsure what the right decision was to make (again, mixed messages).
I wasn’t allowed to get a job because I was younger than 18 and it would have required permission slips, and since he was in trouble with the law that just wasn’t gonna happen (or at least that’s what I was told). So while my mom was at work he’d just sit on his butt and make me cook food for him while he sat and watched TV stuffing his face, and yet still had the audacity to give me speeches about being a “real man”.

If I ate too much food, he’d get angry and call me greedy, but if I ate too little he’d call me a p*ssy for being afraid of him (again, mixed messages), so I opted to simply not eat at all unless it was actually the meal that we were all supposed to eat anyway (breakfast, lunch, and dinner).
I had two getaways available to me. The first was the library, but where we lived at the time, the library was no longer in walking distance, but the mall was. So that was where I spent most of my time. My video games were the demos in the video game stores, and my meals came from the free samples in the food court.

The only real game ‘system’ I owned was an old Game Boy Advance my uncle had given to me years ago.
One day I walked into Toys R’ Us, as I did from time to time. I knew I shouldn’t; it would just be me wishing for things I didn’t have, just like always. But today was different.

A game sat on the counter. Sonic Advance 2. It was being prepped for its box and was covered in that plastic bag stuff. No one was watching, and the cashiers were preoccupied with something else. I thought back to the first time I’d ever tried to steal something back when I was ten, a one dollar knock-off of a Megazord that we couldn’t afford.

I got caught and got in trouble. But now, I was a grown man of fourteen. No longer was I foolish enough to get caught.
I stood ever so slightly away from the counter, slightly obscured by the candy racks. The other parents were chatting with their kids in the lego area, and the cashiers STILL hadn’t turned around yet. My fingers closed around the plastic bag that contained my prize. I slowly, slowly, began to inch the bag towards me, making sure to create as little noise as possible. My heart was pounding in my chest, as goosebumps stood up on every inch of my body.

The cashiers stood less than 5 feet away from me, their backs turned, handling the games in the cases behind the counter.
I inched the bag even closer now. My heart was in my throat at this point. At any moment someone could cry out, and I would be finished. Finally, the moment had come. In one swift motion that would have impressed Houdini himself, I swept the bag off the counter and into my waiting pocket. In that single instant, time seemed to stand still as I waited for the inevitable alarms, the armed guards screaming ‘GET ON THE GROUND!’, perhaps even for some sharp-eyed child to ask ‘Mommy, what is that boy doing?’, exposing me, the Master Thief, to the blinding lights of the civilized world.

The sounds of the world dropped away until all I could hear was the pounding of my own heart and the sounds of my own fearful breath.
But no one noticed a thing.

I calmly walked out of the store, my prize in hand. For the briefest of instants, I felt remorse about what I’d done. But then I remembered watching the children with their parents, without a care in the world, never needing to wonder where their next meal was coming from or even if they would have a roof over their heads the next day. I thought of the people I saw in the food courts, throwing away perfectly good food without a second thought simply because it didn’t stand up to their elite standards of cuisine.

I no longer felt any remorse. This was MINE. I had finally said “No More”, reached out with my own two hands and TAKEN what I wanted from this miserable world, this place where everyone had everything and took it for granted, while I had nothing yet would have cherished even the scraps from the table.

From that moment on, I began my short career of minor crime. No candy bar, no bag of chips, no Hot Wheels Car or deck of Yu-Gi-Oh cards, was safe from my lightning fingers. I would strike from the shadows, leaving no evidence, making sure to take the wrappers with me to dump in the trash far away from the store.

When my stepdad would question me about where I’d gotten these things (which I would take great pains to hide), I would simply say “I found them”, which was believable, since I’d always been lucky in finding new toys on the streets.

No one could stop me, no one was capable of discerning the dastardly machinations that led to the theft of tens, TENS of candy bars.
But one day I was called to the entrance of Toys R’ Us. The woman was asking me about a Green Goblin toy that had apparently gone missing, and she wanted to check my bag. It was understandable since I had attempted to purloin the very item not two hours prior, but the store had been too crowded.

I feigned ignorance, but finally relented and planted my bag down on the ground before me. My innocence would set me free. Sure, it was innocence by way of failure, but shush, I’m telling my epic saga of thievery.

She decided not to search my bag. Obviously, a thief would never allow his bag to be searched. Oh, if only the fool knew that she had almost captured the greatest criminal in human history!
Anyway, she said to never come back and I decided it was getting too risky to keep stealing things.

Thus ended my illustrious criminal career. Had I continued down that path you may have eventually heard of my exploits in stealing from the Louvre.

Alas, it was not to be.” Alex Jackson
2. He Wanted To Cross The American Border The Wrong Way

“We were in Mexico, a few years ago. It was me and maybe 5 more guys, we were having a really great time until one of them decided they would go check out how well the border of Mexico and America was held up.

Jameson thought he would totally get away with it and no legal actions would be taken (boy was he wrong). So I accompanied them on this feat at 3:00 in the morning where we were really close to the checkpoint.
I wasn’t stupid enough to cross the border illegally, neither were any of my friends, except for one, yes, one individual who thought he was keen enough to escape back to America, and that person was none other than Jameson.

He absolutely refused to stay with us, to go back to the U.S. legally. Jamie-boy wanted to see how the illegals got in, so we got in the car, drove off, and left the idiot behind.

Two days later we had to get back to The United States, our trip was over, but Jameson, his trip was only beginning. When we got back to the U.S. we went through customs and immigration to be “legal” again. Not a single soul knew Jameson’s whereabouts, all we knew was he got into the country illegally. It was quite the ‘shocker’ seeing that he was arrested.

Jameson has been released since then and is not allowed to go back to Mexico. He said he was really drunk and woke up inside of a ditch with a battalion of border patrol officers pointing their really bright flashlights at him. When he tried running away, he was tasered and tackled.

That was the most illegal thing we’ve done, he got caught, but only after he successfully made it into America.” Kyle Dennett
1. He Came Back From Europe With A Replica Gun

“When I went backpacking through Europe I bought an airsoft pistol in Italy. A replica Beretta 92fs, nickel plated. It looked real, it was heavy, I could have pointed it at you and you would think it was real.

Because I’m a f***ing idiot, I decided to bring it home to Canada with me.
I packed it in my checked baggage (big backpack) and didn’t think anything of it…until I arrived back in Toronto, and was asked to put my bag in the X-ray machine at customs. At this point, I realized: ‘Holy f**k, I’m bringing a gun into the country’ (replica handguns are completely illegal, I would have been in a s**tload of trouble) and I started to panic. Lucky me, I remembered exactly how I had packed the pistol, so when I lay the bag on the conveyor belt, I laid it down so that the X-ray wouldn’t see the profile of the pistol.

When the bag went through the machine, you could clearly see the gun, but it was at an angle facing away, so rather than a pistol shape, it was just a metal rectangle.
The inspection agent/guy/whatever stopped the belt, pointed directly at the chunk of metal and said: ‘What’s that?’ I looked him dead in the eye and said ‘it’s a toy.’ The next few seconds felt like an eternity…I could feel my pulse pounding in my neck…I was terrified.. but then he just said: ‘Ok.. welcome home,’ and let me go. I retrieved my bag, walked into the main terminal, then went and threw up in the nearest garbage can.

Yea, I was dumb…but I got away with it. Stupid_question_bot
Those were some crazy stories! Which one was your favorite?