Not my own story, but an acquaintance from years ago...

He was working nights at a gas station/convenience store, and had a group of usual customers who he got to know the comings and goings of. One man in particular was known to pretty much always wear the same clothes and stood out because he only had one eye and, being poor, wore a patch over the non-functioning eye. He came there every night to buy cigarettes, and also rented movies a couple of times per week. So: the store had his name and address.

One night, old acquaintance was working at the station when eye patch man came in, but was wearing a large paper bag on his head.

Employee: Hey man. Here for your usual smokes?
Patch: No, this is a robbery!
Employee: Haha! Good one. (and proceeds to put this guy's cigarettes on the counter)
Patch: I'm serious! Give me all the money in the drawer!

Eventually, the guy figured out the robbery attempt was real, handed over the money, and then called the police when eye patch man left.

Now, it's pretty stupid to rob a place where you regularly shop and where they have your name on computer as a video renter, but even more dumb than that:

He only cut one eye hole in the paper bag.

A couple of people broke into my storage facility once.
They cut through the fence and was going through units when they realized there was a camera mounted near them pointed right where they were standing.

They panic, cover their faces up, and then decide to get rid of the camera. They climb up on something and start trying to tear the camera down. While doing this, there is nothing covering their faces anymore and they are literally staring into the lens of the camera no more then 3 feet away.

An Aussie guy I know was out drinking in Canada with another Aussie mate, his mate left early to go back to the flat they were sharing in Vancouver and was accosted in a dark alley by two men with knives.

Being absolutely drunk he failed to pick up on the men's intent, or their knives and simply pushed them aside saying "Nah sorry mate, I'm Australian" and continued to go home.

The poor fellow later realized that he'd just brushed off two armed muggers by tell them he was Australian and ignoring them..

Over the last 2 years i worked at a jimmy johns, and one day we got robbed. He waited for all the customers stop pouring in, and goes go to the bathroom for about 15 minutes. Was he about to pee himself from excitement? I don't know but a coworker walked by during this time and heard him loudly talking to himself, which i guess was to get pumped up.

The he finally walks out to a completely empty jj's, and orders a sandwich... he was clearly nervous and something was up. As soon as the register was open he goes, "I have a knife, give me all your money".

The girl on the register was a super nice girl so she totally blanked. However, our gm at the time, a fat Mexican guy in his mid 20's who grew up in a bad neighborhood, just nonchalantly goes "I don't believe you, show me you're knife." The robber starts bickering with our GM, but the GM stays calm and tells him to show it, so he finally takes his knife out and waves it at us.

Now here's the best part, we all work with knifes and their really sharp but our Mexican, (its an affectionate term) takes this as a challenge and grabs our knife and starts chasing him out the store and down the street. The best part is he's so short and fat, he's waddling in an apron as his running yelling "Fight me like a man joto!".

When the police came the guy was gone but to this day our GM tells that story to every new person we hire.

Ohh and to those of you who don't believe me, here's the proof.
Store was in Carol stream, gm's name was Sebastian.

I work in a car audio store. Guy shows up wanting us to install his amplifier right now. All my installers are busy and tell him ain't going to happen today. But tomorrow we can. He gets all upset and tells me his "boy" will install it himself all he needs is the wires. I show him our amp kits and he picks one out and pays with a credit card and shows me his ID which is good.

So the next thing i see is this fool grabbing a box with some entry level 12" woofers and running out the door and throwing the box into his ride and peeling out of our parking lot. The store was pretty crowded and more than a few customers saw what just went down and asked should they chase this guy down?

I couldn't believe that this idiot just paid with a credit card and I checked his name and ID and it matched so I had all the information I needed to have him arrested. But I said "OH hell no" I just wrote up a ticket and manually punched in the credit card for 3x the amount something like $585.99 instead of $169.96. The charge got approved and was never contested either. I hope he enjoys his speakers.

There were two guys from my high school that robbed a little convenience store. They had ski masks and the robbery went pretty smoothly for them. But they also decided to wear their letterman coats with their names on the back. They were later arrested.

In college I worked as a Loss Prevention guy for one of the Big Boxes, you know, sit in a little room and watch cameras to catch shoplifters.

We were having a problem with customer's wallets being stolen out of the Men's fitting rooms. The victim would go in, try on a new pair of pants, come out to show his wife and when he went back into the fitting room his wallet would be gone.

So one afternoon I get a call from the sales staff about a fight in the Men's fitting room. I run down there to find a 6'2" black guy with a 5'2" white guy in a headlock. The black guy caught the white guy coming out of his room with his wallet. Turns out the black guy's "wallet" was his Secret Service badge and credentials.

Ooops.

Not really a "stupid criminal" more of a "gentleman robber" actually...
I went out at like 2 in the morning to buy cigarettes, tried a few shops but they were all closed. While walking home in sorrow I was accosted by a young man with a knife, who asked quite politely for for all my money... I was a very poor backpacker at the time and the $50 in my pocket was pretty much the last of my money for the month. I showed the guy my empty wallet hoping he would leave it at that but he noticed my bus-pass and decided to take that instead. He then handed me 2 cigarettes and apologised for the "inconvenience" and walked away.

In a state of semi-shock i realised that without my bus-pass i had no way of getting the 5am bus to work and expressed my frustration out loud. The guy came back and asked me what was wrong, after I explained he handed me back my bus-pass and said "we've all got to make a living somehow".

My first legitimate relationship was with a super clingy girl that knew way too much about my house after only being there like 3 times. Parents were out of town and we were sitting in the hot tub when the power went out. She said “oh you probably need to just reset the breaker, it’s in the laundry room on the left wall labeled ‘hot tub’.”

I’m like “how do you know that?”

She got nervous and was like “uhhh I dunno.”

I broke up with her after she started telling her family that we’re spending the rest of our lives together and saying stuff like

“When we get a house...”
“When we have kids...”
“When we get a dog....”

I met her on a dating app and only knew her for 3 months, but started showing all the creepy symptoms after 1.
1 month.

We were kids, early teens. I thought she was mad cute. She was telling me how once she pushed a boy she liked off the swings and he broke his arm. She was bragging about it. And she liked me now..

"Cool", I thought. "I will now proceed to never see you again".

She befriended my younger sister just to get her to ask her to a sleepover.

I woke up in the middle of the night with her laying in bed with me.

I was 17 y/o

she was 13.

I was bored once at a small, local festival and didn't want to be there so I just got a drink and started walking around aimlessly when I noticed a firebreather. The display was interesting and she was pretty hot, when she was on break she went to get a drink and we started talking. She seemed nice, we had a laughed but her break was up and she resumed her display so I left her to it and continued to wander around. 5 mins later security was called to her display...

Turns out some crazy girl whom I had never met before was following me around the festival and assaulted the firebreather, she had claimed that we (me & crazy) were together and firebreather was trying to break us up.

Girl in my dorm. She had a crush on my roommate. My roommate clearly didn’t like and told her several times. Things got out of hand and there were times where my roommate would come running back to the room yelling “lock the door, lock the door” and moments later the girl and her friend would try to come barge in without permission.

What’s creepy is this next part. Apparently one night we accidentally left our room unlocked and she decided to sneak in. We didn’t wake up but her roommate told us what she did a couple days later. I haven’t seen her in about a year and I’m quite glad.

When I was 14, I had an mp3 player (showing my age) and it stopped working, because the connection points on the batter had gotten warped and weren't connecting properly. All it really needed was something to squeeze it together. So my mum fixed it with the the best small, non-conductive, flexible material she had at hand: a piece of pistachio shell.

We have a golden pistachio trophy that we circulate to members of the family who cobble together MacGyver solutions to problems.

I worked at Sears Automotive, in the 80’s, as a teenager. It was a really windy day and as I walked to my car I pulled out the only bill in my pocket, a 20, which was a fortune to me at the time. The bill blew out of my hand and disappeared into the abyss. I went back inside, and I told a very old salesperson what had happened and he continued to cut a piece of paper the size of a bill. He walked outside, where I lost the bill, and let go of the paper. We were able to follow the piece of paper, and within a minute it LANDED on top of the lost 20 dollar bill. I kid you not!

I grew up in the foster care system. At one home, the foster dad was chief of police. He also had a farm in the northern part of the state.

He brought us foster kids up one weekend. A few days after getting home he found that one of his guns was missing. After days of nobody saying anything one of the kids admitted to taking it and bringing it to the farm where he got scared and tossed it in a field.

We spent the next 2 days walking through extremely tall grass looking for the thing. We were never going to find it.

The foster dad, who owned a retired police dog at that time, came out with an old, rusted, non working gun. He looked at all of us and said “I’ve tried dumber stuff than this and it worked” and pretended to throw the gun in the field.

The dog brought back the missing gun 30 seconds later….

I was stationed in Seoul, South Korea several years ago. I was taking a shower in my room and when i got out, the word "leave" was written in small letters in the fog on the bathroom mirror. I didn't have a roommate because NCOs got their own private rooms. A little freaked out, I decided to do exactly that; leave. I went off post for some Korean BBQ and wondered the city a bit.

I came back a couple hours later to find the barracks was evacuated and half burned to the ground. The fire was pinpointed to faulty electrical wiring that caught some insulation on fire inside the walls.

Something knew it was going to happen and to this day, whatever that something was, it didn't want me in the middle of it. I'd gladly thank who or whatever it is if they'd give me the chance but it's been years and I still have no idea.