Hilarious Videos Of Stupid Criminals In Action

Committing a crime is a bad idea for many reasons. The biggest of which, of course, is getting caught on camera. Yes, that whole "going to jail" part is a bummer, but what about living the rest of your life being Internet famous for being a criminal, especially if you're also an idiot? In a time when almost everyone is walking around with an HD camera in their pocket, and every street corner is under surveillance, nobody should expect to get away with anything. These dumb criminals sure didn't, and cameras caught them in the act.

A mask has one job: hide your face. This concept was apparently lost on Patrick McGuire, when he robbed a Circle K convenience store with a clear plastic bag over half his face. Yep, just the bottom half of his face. Maybe he was trying to be the opposite of Batman in every possible way. Although to his credit, why risk dying of suffocation from a completely ineffective disguise? According to the DOJ, McGuire only got sixty bucks from the moronic crime, but he was also on probation and had "fourteen previous felony convictions and over thirty misdemeanor convictions" at the time. That's a possible 43 other crimes in which he failed to figure out that it's best if the victims don't see his face. Amazing.

In what has to be the swiftest delivery of justice ever, a Chilean bus driver foils a would-be purse snatcher by trapping his hand in the bus door and beating him with a stick until he drives directly to the police. The thief cries and attempts to lie and claim the victim was his aunt and he was just joking, but the bus driver was having none of that mess. The whole incident takes less than two minutes to resolve, meaning he probably wasn't even late to the next stop. Anyone who takes public transit will agree that makes him even more of a hero.

According to Local 10 News in Ft. Lauderdale, four teens successfully committed a string of residential burglaries before making a brag video, then accidentally leaving the camcorder with said video behind in a crashed, stolen car. In the video, they make it rain with stolen cash, show off jewelry, and even feature a safe they lifted from someone's house. Who knows what possessed them to make a video containing not only their unobscured faces, but literally every single piece of evidence the cops would need to build a substantial case against them? Oh wait, we actually do know—this was in Florida. Case closed.

Hannah Sabata, the Nebraska teenager who went by the YouTube handle "Jellee Beanie," famously made a brag video after robbing a bank and stealing a car. Showing a bit of creative flair, Sabata doesn't speak during the video, but instead holds up a series of handwritten messages confessing to multiple felonies. It was like INXS's video for "Mediate," only dumber and self-incriminating. Not surprisingly, she was quickly arrested and sentenced to 10-20 years.

It's a well-known fact that paper is made of money. Another well-known fact is that paper is highly flammable. So why not try to extract that highly flammable material from an ATM by rigging it with an improvised explosive? That's exactly what Dylan John Lewers of the oh-so-appropriately-named town of Darwin, Australia did. For his efforts, he was literally blown out of his sandals and charged with arson when the police finally caught him. Did he at least get to spend some of the ill-gotten cash? Probably not, since last time we checked, piles of ashes weren't acceptable forms of payment.

A bunch of homeowners in Greece were dodging taxes by not disclosing they had a swimming pool on their property, so government officials took to orbit to seek out the tax cheats. Using Google Earth and satellite imagery, they quickly found the secret pools. While it's obvious that trying to conceal a swimming pool isn't an intelligent plan for saving a few bucks on taxes, we're willing to bet those homeowners didn't think they were going to be nailed by cameras in space. So now they have to pony up the back taxes, and forever wonder if the Earth was at the right rotation to capture their late-night skinny dipping sessions.

What is the last thing a person should do when standing directly in front of a uniformed police officer, besides premeditated murder? Robbing a convenience store would have to be pretty high on that list. This life lesson was apparently lost on Stephen Daniel, because he did exactly that while the manager basically laughed in his face while he handed over the contents of the cash register. Other customers actually walked up beside Daniel and paid for their own items, clearly in no fear of the criminal with amazingly bad timing. How was that not a huge red flag to him? And what was the next part of his plan: drive to the police station and demand they use their helicopter to fly him to Mexico?

This video is technically just an audio clip, but it makes this list for the compounding levels of epic stupid it contains. Michigan cop Edward Sanchez called 911 because he thought he and his wife might both be dead from eating a bunch of weed they baked into brownies. How 911 was going to help him, if that was even scientifically possible, is anyone's guess, but the infamous call doesn't stop there. Sanchez also admits that he feels like time is moving really slowly, his wife may have taken five or six Vicodin that day, and he attempts to confirm the score on the Detroit Red Wings game in order to "make sure this isn't some type of hallucination." As if the 911 call didn't already make Sanchez look moronic, it was later revealed that the weed was actually evidence confiscated by Sanchez during a criminal investigation. He was fired, of course, but will forever be known as Lieutenant Bonehead in our hearts.