The Facebook Burglar
In 2012, a burglar broke into a house in the Dutch town of Drachten. He stole valuables. He took electronics. And then — for reasons that defy all logic — he sat down at the victim's computer and logged into his own Facebook account.
He forgot to log out.
The homeowner came home to a ransacked house and a glowing screen displaying the burglar's full name, photo, hometown, and current employer. Police knocked on his door within hours. He was genuinely surprised they found him.
This is the story of the man who left more personal information at a crime scene than most people put on a dating profile.
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The Instagram Fugitive
A Dutch fugitive convicted in absentia in 2010 spent nine years on the run — through Spain, Portugal and Greece, on four fake identities, paying in cash, leaving no digital trail. By 2019 he had settled in Mallorca and concluded, after nine quiet years, that the European Arrest Warrant was no longer being actively pursued.
The Drug Delivery Pigeons
Bucharest, 2015. A medium-security Romanian prison runs, as part of a sanctioned rehabilitation programme, a small pigeon-keeping loft in one of its exercise yards. The inmates raise the pigeons from hatching. Some of the inmates are, in their pre-incarceration lives, experienced pigeon racers. Pigeons return to where they were raised. Pigeons can be trained to carry small loads. Pigeons can be carried out of a prison by visiting volunteers, released across Bucharest, and they will fly — by every measure of homing-pigeon biology — back home through the air over a twelve-metre concrete wall.
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