Minor crimes

[TibBo]

When I used to work at a quiet local pub, I found out that you could scam the 20p sweet machines with the turning handles, by wedging a matchstick in them and dropping a 1p in. I was never on shift to see the guy refill the machines and find all the bits of matchstick stuck inside sadly.

[FLips]

A few from me but not really on the level of some of you lot.

I can't remember how old I was, somewhere in the 8-10 bracket I would wager. The bloke who runs the fruit and veg place round my local shops has had his car tipped and set alight around the garages at the back of the shops. Every kid in the estate it seems gathers to watch as news spreads, which is mad when you think this was 1998-2000 and none of us had internet or phones yet.
Well we're watching this blazing car as close as we can with absolutely no fear of a potential explosion and I'm dying for a piss, so I go up the fire escape at the back of the dentist's and start pissing against the wall on their roof when the grumpiest baldest copper that could have showed up catches me cock in hand and bollocks me in front of everyone like there isn't a huge fucking fire 10 feet from him.
Rumour back then and even now as the bloke still runs the fruit and veg place is that it was an insurance jobby but that's unrelated to my piss bollocking.

Another time when I was 16, four of us take a bottle of vodka from my girlfriend at the time's Gran's house as she was away on holiday and my girlfriend was reponsible for doing the lights and that. We're stupid and think putting it in a carrier bag is enough to hide it and as luck would have it as we're heading down the street towards the field a police woman pulls up because she can obviously see it in the bag and makes us pour the whole bottle out in front of her then drives off again. Probably for the best because I don't think any of us even liked vodka and I don't think any of us would have hidden it well at home either.

Only other thing I suppose is our large group of mates when were 14-16 found a way onto the school roof via the bins so now and again we'd all get up and piss about on the roof. One time someone must have grassed us up and a load of police turned up so we all like geniuses just laid down flat on the roof so they couldn't see us behind the various lips and walls. Because it was outside of school hours and they didn't know how we got up, they couldn't get into the grounds or on the roof so just pottered about shouting for us to come down for half an hour then fucked off.

Don't know how any of you are all getting away with stuff because I couldn't even take a piss as a kid without the police catching me. Probably why I never did anything more serious than trespassing and failing to drink vodka.

Edited February 4 by FLips

[SuperBacon]

Reminds me of when we had electricity on a proper meter and would put 50p on a bit of string to trick it. There was a moment where you could hear it make a noise which meant the coin had registered, but it was bloody tricky.

We also used to have scratchcard style bus passes so you would scratch off your day and use it, but my sisters silver nail varnish was used every day to cover back up the day so you could reuse it for an entire month. 

Great days.

[SpiritOfTheForest]

Just last month I received free rail travel. Was on a day out into Glasgow to go drinking with my brother and there was no ticket guy on the train. Alighted at Partick and there were no barriers so casually strolled along feeling quite proud at having stolen a railway journey. It got even better as on the return leg there was no ticket guy on that train either. Disregard the constabulary! 

[Scratch]

My mate’s brother used to have a Rover 200 and noted one parked in a lay-by on the A120 every day to-and-from work one week that had some decent alloys on it. One morning, he pulled in and noted the passenger door was open and realised it had been abandoned. To his surprise, he then found all the paperwork in the glovebox.

Grabbing the documents, he got back in his van and promised himself to Jack it up and take the alloys on his way home.

As he was approaching the abandoned car at the end of the day, he noted 2 blokes on the other side of the carriage way jacking it up.

He parked up, dodged the traffic and walked over shouting “what are you doing to my fucking car?!” (He looks just like Phil Mitchel for reference), waving the documents to “prove” the car was his.

The two blokes froze, apologised, explaining how they thought the car was abandoned and that they had already removed one of the wheels.

My mate’s brother gave his best “annoyed” face, paused and then calmly explained how if they took the other 3 wheels off and put them all in his van on the other side of the road, he wouldn’t go to the police.

[Harry Wiseau]

I had an eye test today along with my son, his test was free because he's at school but they did some extra scan which was supposed to be £10 and but covered the the nhs. I ended up having to pay almost £300 because I needed new glasses but when I paid there was no mention made of the £10 for his scan, it softened the £300 blow somewhat but I do worry that when I go to pick my new bins up they'll want that £10. 

[Wretch]

I’ve been stealing YouTube premium for the best part of eighteen months I reckon. I watch a lot of YT, and noticed sometime in 2022 that I hadn’t seen a single ad in a little bit. Checked my subscriptions to see if I’d signed up to premium while pissed in the early hours or something, but nothing. I watch the majority of it via my Virgin box, so there’s no ad blockers running or anything like that. When I watch on my phone, there's no ads there either, which again, has no ad blockers going on in the background. I do get the occasional pop up before a video asking if I’d consider moving to premium, as we all do, but I just close it down and on I go. 
 

I was genuinely gutted when just before Christmas, I had a couple of ads play halfway through a video. I thought well that’s shit, but I’ve not had one ad since 2022, so fair enough really, the game’s up. Had them for about half a day, but since then I’ve gone back to being ad free again. Still none the wiser as to what’s happened.

Edited February 5 by Wretch

[SuperBacon]

Not for years have I done this, but anywhere I used to go that had newspapers to read, I'd be nicking one. Cafes and hotels mostly. 

When we lived in Surrey, we'd take the kids to Chessington quite often and stay over as my ex worked for Merlin and got a massive discount.

After breakfast, I'd be stuffing copies of The Guardian and FT into the bottom of the buggy while she would look on mortified.

 

[Daaaaaad!]

Back at secondary school I was peer pressured into committing a really stupid crime that garnered me a FORMAL SCHOOL DETENTION, which I assume has remained on my permanent record ever since and is probably why I’m not employed as a CEO or a Power Ranger by now.

We used to have football matches on a Thursday and, since I am uncoordinated and unathletic, I was always involved in the 2nd XI vs. 3rd XI match while the proper first team either travelled away or had visiting opponents. This match for rejects always kicked off earlier than the first team game, so subsequently would finish earlier too. So one week, we arrived back in the changing rooms to discover the other school’s stuff strewn around the place - including a cardboard box with loads of CD cases in it. Anyway, one kid shouts up “oi, there’s PlayStation games in here!”

Upon inspection, it transpires they’re copied games, as was very regular with the PSone. Between us it’s quickly decided that we can take these - after all, it’s illegal to pirate games, so they can’t do anything about it or they’ll be in bother themselves! It’s the perfect crime! My fellow B and C teamers all helped themselves to a game each, as did I, fully believing that this was okay because everyone else is doing it too. I stuffed the CD case in my backpack and took it home, hiding it in my top drawer.

The next day, a rumour goes around that the police have been in and that the game thieves are in bother. I hear nothing until the afternoon, at which point a group of us are summoned to stand outside the head of year’s office. Everyone is steadfast in their commitment not to talk. We’re all Spartacus!

The teacher calls me in as I mull over what I’ll say, convinced I have a clever response to anything. Until his first words are “right @Daaaaaad! - the Spyro game, where is it?” Flummoxed by the fact that not only do they know I was involved but they even know exactly what I took, I burst into tears and sob that it’s at home in my football bag. My parents are informed and I am led from the office in disgrace. It turns out my peers had all dumped their stolen copies around the school; only I was stupid enough to take mine home.

The daft thing is, I already owned Spyro 3 and didn’t even have a chipped PlayStation, but my mate across the road did and I thought he’d want it. Worse still, I discovered years later that Spyro 3 had an anti piracy measure written into its code, which would’ve rendered the entire thing pointless even if I’d somehow passed on the stolen contraband. 

Edited February 4 by Daaaaaad!

[TildeGuy~!]

My mom and dad would do the weekly shop on a Friday and every week for a couple of years I was still at an age where I wasn’t allowed to be in the house alone so I’d run off to the magazine section whilst they shopped and I’d read the gaming magazines but I’d always steal the demo discs out of them.

[King Mal the Glorious]

1 hour ago, Wretch said:

I’ve been stealing YouTube premium for the best part of eighteen months I reckon. I watch a lot of YT, and noticed sometime in 2022 that I hadn’t had a single ad in a little while. Checked my subscriptions to see if I’d signed up to premium while pissed in the early hours or something but nothing. I watch the majority of it on my Virgin box, so there’s no ad blockers running or anything. I do get the occasional pop up before a video asking if I’d consider moving to premium, but I just close it down and on I go. 
 

I was genuinely gutted when just before Christmas, I had a couple of ads play halfway through a video. I thought well that’s shit, but I’ve not had a single ad since 2022, so fair enough really, the game’s up. Had them for about half a day, but since then I’ve gone back to being ad free again. Still none the wiser as to what’s happened.

Along the same lines, I've been getting Amazon Prime free for about 2 years. My account used to be linked to my ex's so I got her benefits, but when we split we unlinked them. She cancelled her subscription ages ago but somehow I'm still getting full access to Prime, it's very handy.

[cobra_gordo]

When I was 19 or 20 our usual Thursday night tradition was to go and watch the bands at a local rock/metal/punk night, have a few pints in the Wetherspoons up the road and then down the hill to a rock bar that played music until the early hours. It was the sort of place that was dark, loud and always packed. It had a club atmosphere as there was a big dancefloor that was always full but had booths and quiet areas and band posters on the walls, memorabilia, that sort of thing. They had a massive Jägermeister banner on the back wall. This thing was probably 5 foot long and a couple of feet tall, made from a heavy vinyl material with big eyelets around the edges that they'd used to put screws through to attach it to the wall. It was fucking glorious.

One particular night we'd gone through the usual bands, pub, bar routine and late on and with a skinfull, me and a mate had the genius idea that we were going to have that Jäger banner. We spent ages stood near it, sneakily loosening each of the many screws securing it to the wall, backs towards the banner as to not arouse suspicion, turning the screws with one hand whilst still being able to sup a pint with the other.

The whole process of loosening the screws took ages as we kept on having to stop and act like we weren't trying to nick a 5 foot long flag. We finally got the last screw loosened, started taking them all out and as we got to the last one we get a tap on the shoulder. It's one of the bouncers. They and the bar staff have spent the last hour watching us try to nick the banner on the CCTV. We got away lightly, weren't thrown out or given a kicking, just a wry smile and a "Pop that back on the wall will ye lads".

[Statto]

Another streaming service related one - I cancelled my BT/TNT Sports subscription back in July when it became apparent they were no longer going to be showing college football after the re-brand. 

My account was one that was originally direct with ESPN, then transferred direct to BT, so I had to phone BT to cancel it. They'd already done the integration into Discovery+ before I cancelled though for the last 6 months I've still been able to get TNT Sports through there despite not paying for it.

They seem to have caught up with me last week, though. Sadly. 

[DavidB6937]

I've been reading this and thinking what I've done and generally failed. I think it's probably because my parents owned shops and so I never really needed to "steal" anything, or I knew the people running them and that would've been a bit shit.

Only thing that really came to mind was drinking those mini cans in Safeway/Morrisons while I walked around with my dad doing the shopping.

And the fact I'm still not paying for Paramount + because it was included with my Sky Movies subscription and yet I haven't been with Sky in ages.

[BomberPat]

there was a supermarket I used to shop in, one of the first near me to get self-checkouts, and they weren't weighted yet so you could scan through just about anything and put something else in the bagging area, it just needed to know that something had been put there. I never really took advantage of it - it's not like they had a big ticket items, so I couldn't put through a PS3 as a bag of carrots or anything like that - apart from they had these filled baguettes from a local bakery, and the self checkout never scanned the barcodes on them, so a few times I just paid for everything else and helped myself to them. I always figured that if I got caught I'd plead ignorant and say I scanned it through and hadn't realised that it hadn't registered.

When they brought in the new 50ps in '97, one of the vending machines at school had seemingly not been properly changed over, and it would sometimes accept a 2p as a 50p. I can't remember how much drinks cost in it, so whether you were just getting a can for 2p or actually making a profit on it if it gave you change, I can't remember, but we managed to keep that between just a few of us for months.

Another school one, though less of a crime, was towards the end of secondary school we were all given usernames and passwords to access the internet. It was a Jersey education department network, and had really strict restrictions that were common to every school, and every time you logged in you got a little pop-up window with "Settings" options and a couple of other things. Somehow, I got hold of a class-mate's password, and figured that if I logged in as him then it wouldn't be me that got in trouble if I went on any blocked websites. For some reason, one time I logged in as him, and that pop-up window had a ton more options on it, like it were a staff or admin account. I assume it was just a weird one-off error, but it meant I was able to go in there and edit a bunch of settings, including turning off all restrictions. Within a few weeks, practically everyone in my year was using this poor lad's account to access all manner of filth and other blocked sites every time they got behind a computer, and I got a reputation as being some kind of elite hacker for something I just stumbled into.

 

As a shitty idiot teenager I did some shoplifting. I grew up around a fair few people who shoplifted, or who had simple scams going (e.g. M&S customer service aren't particularly strict about having a receipt for returns, so find M&S shirts cheap in charity shops and return them to M&S for a profit), as well as a lot of general dodgy dealing and buying things that fell off the back of a van, because everyone was skint and you do what you can to get by and make life worth living. Shamefully, none of that was the case when I started nicking stuff, I was just friends with some little dickheads who thought it was fun. Some of them used to brag about how much they stole from HMV, and would make fun of people who spent money there because they felt it was so easy to nick stuff - I never dared, because I figured it was a big enough shop that I'd get in real trouble if I got caught, that it would have good security (I later worked in their stockroom and realised that they very much didn't), and I didn't want to end up barred from there given it sold pretty much everything I spent my money on. Instead, a bunch of my mates starting stealing Pokémon cards from a little shop, usually by all going in en masse and hoping that one buying something would cause enough of a distraction for everyone else to slip something into their pockets. I can't remember if it was me who eventually got caught, or someone else, but the woman who ran the shop basically made everyone hand over whatever they had - I had a packet of WWF trading cards slipped into my sock - and then got all of our home phone numbers so they could call our parents and tell us what we'd done, which sucked. I felt so shit about it even at the time, because it was a small business, it was for small items that any of us could have afforded to buy, and didn't need in the first place, we were just doing it because it seemed cool - and honestly I don't think I ever thought it was cool in the first place, it was just peer pressure bollocks.

 

I worked for three years in a petrol station that's probably the least professional, most shambolic place I've ever worked. It was a real timewarp - run-down old-fashioned place, customers weren't allowed to serve their own fuel, so I had to go out and pump petrol every time someone drove on to the forecourt, and the "office" was just a tiny little freezing cold alcove, no heating and a knackered wooden door with at least an inch of space between the floor and the bottom of the door, and with walls stained yellow because the previous manager had just sat in their all day with a pipe on. The manager was in his 40s, and had worked there since he was a teenager; I knew him from a local heavy metal night, and he only ever hired his mates, so I knew the other couple of blokes who worked there from the same place, and it was easy enough for me to get a job there when I dropped out of uni, without an interview, a CV, nothing. He was looking for someone to replace a guy that was leaving, and I urgently needed work, so I was able to just show up and start work as soon as they'd got me a uniform that fit.
He was a shit manager, and I don't know how much of the mad ways he ran the place were because it was how it had been done when he started, or if they were all weird things he invented. When we cashed up at the end of the day, we had to manually take measurements from all the underground fuel tanks as well, and then calculate the difference between actual cash and what went through the till, and between takings and the amount the tanks had been depleted that day. If there was ever any real difference, he would fuck with the figures to make it look like everything was fine, and dock the money from the wages of whoever had been working that day - bearing in mind were on minimum wage as it is. On top of that, both him and the other guy who worked there were constantly late to work - they both lived within walking distance, I was half an hour or more away on the bus, yet I was always on the 6.30am/7.00am opening shift because I was the only one that could be relied upon to actually show up; if they turned up late, it just meant I had to wait longer for the end of my shift and for them to get there, whereas if I turned up late the place wasn't open and wouldn't make money. And when I say that they were late, I meant consistently, every day, usually at least half an hour, sometimes more than an hour, and usually turning up with takeaway coffee and a bag of shopping in hand. The bosses presumably never found out that the other two were late, because the manager would also doctor the figures for that - he'd try and work it out as "hours owed", and think that if he turned up an hour early one day next week (without any prior notice) that it would make up for turning up late two or three times the week before. It didn't.

Anyway, it was a complete shitshow, and I felt very little guilt about ripping them off once I figured out how. Cash or card payments just went straight through the till, but if a customer had a Shell card, the details had to be entered in a separate machine complete with the amount of fuel served - most of our customers were regulars, and had one of those cards. Then there were customers who had accounts with us, or worked somewhere that entitled them to a 10% discount on any sale over £10, and the agreement there was that for a £10 payment, we'd pump £11.11 worth of fuel, and work the discounts that way. So I'd wait until there was a big payment by cash or card that wasn't eligible for a discount, but wasn't traceable by a Shell card or account number. So someone comes in and gets £70 worth of fuel - well, then I put that through the till as £77.77 minus a 10% discount, and the next time someone comes in and pays £7 cash, that doesn't go through the till and goes straight in my pocket. That way, the amount of fuel sold and the amount that went through the till matches up, and I get to skim a little off the top for my trouble.