Criminals Pushing the Envelope of What People Will Fall For

By Alicia Dorr in News on Apr 4, 2006 4:16PM

Either the cleverest or the most ridiculous criminal ever is on the loose, gallivanting about the Indiana countryside trying to pass off oven doors as flat screen TVs.

Yeeah. And when we say "trying" we mean "someone has already bought an oven door under the pretense that it was a flat screen TV." The scheming crook didn't even have the decency to pass off a shiny new door; a woman opened the box to what she thought would be a state-of-the-art flat screen only to find a dirty old Sears Roebuck number. It's sort of hard to feel bad for her, though. Seriously, she was approached by some random offering a flat screen TV on the spot for $500, and she talked him down to $300—what, did she think it fell off a truck or something? It's not exactly the kind of good an offender pulls out of a trench coat.

To make matters both worse and more hilarious, the police in South Bend are apparently saying this wasn't an isolated incident. Word on the beat is that oven doors are increasingly one of the most sought-after items to burgle from unoccupied properties. We'll give you the robbers stealing oven doors and passing them off as MTV Cribs-style TVs, but why are the police monitoring how many oven doors there are in vacant properties?