Crime Facts

About 1 in 30 people, in the U.S., are in jail, on probation, or on parole!

Ching Shih, once a prostitute, became one of the most powerful pirates to have ever sailed. She commanded one of the most formidable pirate fleets in all of China during the early 1800s, with hundreds of ships under her command.

The most common time for a bank robbery is Friday, between 9 and 11 a.m. The least likely time is Wednesday, between 3 and 6 p.m.

Boys with unpopular first names are more likely to commit juvenile crimes than boys with popular names. Researchers found a direct correlation: the less popular the name, the higher the likelihood of delinquency. Girls with unusual names don't show this pattern.

Only 1 out of 700 identity thieves gets caught!

Most burglaries occur during the daytime!

Less than 10% of criminals commit about 67% of all crime.

In 1942, there was a man in Mississippi called the Phantom Barber who would break into people's houses at night and cut their hair.

Nearly half of all identity theft victims know their thief personally—whether a family member, friend, neighbor, or coworker.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, approximately 83% of Americans will experience an attempted or completed crime at some point in their lifetime, with about 52% becoming victims of violent crime more than once.

When pirate Jean Lafitte saw the governor advertising a $500 reward for his capture, Lafitte offered $5,000 for the capture of the governor.

In 2008, a 13-year-old boy in Florida was arrested for excessive farting in school.

In 2013, the Netherlands scheduled 19 prisons to be closed due to a lack of criminals.

In 1968, a car driven by bank employees was pulled over by a motorcycle cop claiming the car had been rigged with a bomb. The cop got under the car to “defuse” the device. When the car started to smoke, everybody ran. Then the “cop” just drove the car away. The 300,000,000 Yen robbery remains unsolved to this day.

The IRS officially requires criminals to report income from illegal activities like drug dealing, theft, and bribes on their tax returns. While the Fifth Amendment protects them from having to reveal the source of the income, failing to report it is still tax evasion—which is exactly how they got Al Capone.

In 1986, federal prisoner Ronald J. McIntosh escaped during an unsupervised prisoner transfer. Eight days later, he returned in a stolen helicopter and broke out his girlfriend, bank robber Samantha Lopez, from federal prison in a daring daylight rescue.

At the height of Prohibition, Al Capone's criminal empire generated approximately $105 million per year from bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution. In today's dollars, that's roughly $1.8 billion annually.

In the late 1990s, a South African inventor created the 'Blaster,' a car-mounted flamethrower designed to repel carjackers, which briefly became legal to sell due to a loophole in self-defense laws.

When the 2022 drought dropped Lake Mead to its lowest level since filling in 1937, boaters at Hemenway Harbor found a corroded 55-gallon barrel containing human remains. The victim had been shot in the head, execution-style, and the Kmart clothing inside dated the crime to the late 1970s or early 1980s - a period when the Chicago mob ran Las Vegas. Three years on, the barrel victim is still unidentified.

During an Easter egg hunt in Surrey in 2016, about 30 kids spotted two men sprinting across a field with a police helicopter circling overhead. Without being told, the children lay down in the dirt and formed a giant human arrow pointing the helicopter straight at the fleeing suspects. Both men were caught. The crew landed to thank the kids — and the children shared their own Easter chocolate with them.

In 1971, a man named Dan Cooper hijacked a plane, extorted $200,000, parachuted into a stormy night, and vanished without a trace. The only clue ever found was $5,800 of the ransom, rotting on a riverbank years later.

In 1925, con man Victor Lustig forged government documents, posed as a ministry official, and convinced six scrap metal dealers that the French government was secretly selling the Eiffel Tower for scrap. He "sold" it to the highest bidder. The victim was so humiliated he never went to police. So Lustig went back to Paris and sold it a second time.

In 2009, thieves arrived by helicopter on a cash depot roof in Stockholm. They had placed a fake bomb at the police helicopter hangar. Scattered caltrops on every access road. Stole $5.3 million and escaped clean. Police caught them months later through DNA on a piece of duct tape someone had licked.

In 1997, a 23-year-old French con artist convinced a Texas family he was their missing teenage son — despite having brown eyes instead of blue, a heavy French accent, and being a completely different person. He lived with them for months before a private investigator uncovered the truth.