Casino bonus hustling: the Dumb and Dumber way
35 year old Andrei Ospiau is a native Belarusian living in the UK and he really loves chasing juicy online casino bonuses. And he’s had quite a bit of success turning generous welcome bonuses into cash through disciplined play and timely cash outs…almost £80,000 in fact. Problem was he had a habit of doing this using multiple, stolen identities and using those stolen identities in a rather careless way.
His exploits came to the attention of an unidentified casino operator last year when they received two passports with the same picture but different names within 12 minutes of each other. Not a move out of the ‘How to Successfully Commit Identity Theft’ handbook. The casino alerted police who then visited Mr Ospiau’s home and found 5,900 scans of passports, utility bills and other forms of ID belonging individuals from a number of countries around the world.
In a London court this week Ospiau pleaded guilty to fraud, possession of articles for use in fraud, transferring criminal property and was sentenced to 3 years in jail.
Couple of lessons to be learned here:
- encouragingly, it’s proof positive that there are online casinos out there offering welcome bonuses that can be easily profited from (pity we weren’t told which ones); and
- in case you hadn’t heard the old adage – crime doesn’t pay…particularly if you’re a half-wit.
This case is a reminder that not all criminals are masterminds. But there are others.
The Dumb and Dumber Vail bank robbers.
Remember these guys? Back in 2005 Anthony Prince (NZ) and Luke Carroll (Australian) robbed the WestStar Bank in Vail Colorado and made off with $130,000 but were caught by police before boarding a flight to Mexico. They were probably surprised the police were able to track them down so quickly. No one else is, for a number of reasons. First, when they entered the WestStar Bank and began threatening the bank teller with a BB gun they still had their work name tags on. Second, the teller and other bank employees probably could have identified them without their name tags on as they had been regular customers of the branch during their stay in Vail. Third, they gave the taxi driver who drove them to the airport a $20,000 cash tip. Fourth, they continued to flash wads of cash around and take photos of themselves with the cash at the airport.
Fresh out from serving 4 years jail, Prince has now written a book titled Bank Robbery for Beginners. In it he admits, “For me and my naive mind at the time it was as simple as going and getting the money and leaving.”
James Wombles, the GPS thief.
James didn’t rob the Garmin warehouse. He became known as the GPS thief after committing a series of robberies while wearing a police issued GPS tracking anklet. Not quite sure what James thought the anklet was for or why the police had attached it to his leg, but needless to say it placed him at the scene of each crime and allowed the police to pick him up at their leisure.
Thomas Infante
Thomas wasn’t wearing a name tag when he robbed the Fifth Third Bank in 2008. He even had the sense not to speak during his hold-up, rather calmly passing a note to the teller that read, “Be Quick Be Quit. Give your cash or I’ll shoot”. His big mistake was writing the note on the back of one of his work pay stubs.
Ann Marie Linscott hires a hitman
This is my personal favorite.
Butte County Police and the FBI worked together to foil an attempt to commit murder by Ann Marie a few years ago. She was sentenced to 12 years and 7 months in prison after it was found that she had tried to hire a hit man to have someone killed. They know this because she tried to find her assassin by posting an advertisement on Craigslist. The ad offered a $5,000 fee for “freelance” work, requiring the successful applicant with “silent assassin” experience to “eradicate a female living in Oroville, California” (full name and address was provided).
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!