In case you weren't already convinced of a certain model of Nokia 1100's hackability by the exponential surge in its aftermarket value, fraud investigation firm Ultrascan has successfully recreated a virtual bank heist by reprogramming one of the devices to receive another phone number's text messages. Using this trick, shady characters in fancy suits can get your mobile transaction authentication number -- provided you live in a country like Germany or Holland that use mTANs -- and use it to get into your bank account and transfer funds. They'd also need your account name and password, mind you, but obtaining that data isn't nearly as complex when there's plenty of people clicking on the wrong emails and signing into fake website with all those deets and the associated digits. It all sounds a bit like the stuff of crime novels, doesn't it? And before you go running to eBay with that 1100 you stashed away in a drawer years ago, please note that it only works if the candybar was produced at a very specific plant in Bochum, Germany.

No, you're not being mercilessly attacked by an unyielding feeling of déjà vu for no good reason -- we really have seen something eerily similar to this happen before. This go 'round, we've got a totally innocent ten year old boy who was given Guitar Hero for DS prior to even owning a console; as the mother finally ended the tease, she handed him a shiny new DS handheld for him to unwrap. Unfortunately for everyone involved, all that was tucked inside was a couple of stones, a Chinese newspaper and boatloads of disappointment. After the Walmart store from which she purchased it referred her to the Big N, she furiously admitted the following: "They don't want to do nothing. They want me to keep the box of rocks. I'm not buying a box of rocks for $138." Thankfully, Wally World finally refunded her and threw in a $20 gift card for the trouble (after being hounded by a local news station, mind you), but the real damage -- losing all hope in humanity -- will never be undone. Ever.

[Via plugged in]

For whatever reason, Apple's iPod ends up in the middle of quite a few crimes. The latest story, however, is even more extreme than usual. Nicholas Arthur Woodhams, a 23 year old from Kalamazoo, Michigan, was recently slapped upside the gord with federal charges of fraud and money laundering after he managed to con Apple into shipping him around 9,000 iPod shuffles. As the story goes, he managed to somehow correctly guess thousands of valid shuffle serial numbers and have replacements shipped to him; once they arrived, he sold them for less than MSRP to excited buyers, all while giving Apple a prepaid VISA number that would reject the charges after he failed to send back the nonexistent "original" shuffle. It's rather amazing to us that he was able to pull this off for so long without being noticed, but even if it works for awhile, we've learned yet again that crime doesn't pay. In fact, the feds have already seized a half million bucks from one brokerage account, some real estate and a trio of vehicles. Tragic, yeah?

[Via Macworld, thanks Steve]

We always thought the Sega Master System's stealth-black Light Phaser was cooler than our blaze orange NES Zapper, but we never thought it could actually mistaken for a real weapon -- it's pretty obviously plastic, after all. Yeah, we were wrong: a Brazilian man apparently held a 60-year old woman hostage at, uh, phaserpoint for 10 hours until surrendering to police. Next time? He's taking down a bank with a Super Scope.

[Via Kanye West]

The sketch artist at the Kanagawa, Japan police department must've been on vaca last week -- local authorities there decided to use this shady-looking Mii to try and catch a man suspected of a hit and run. Crude, yet effective -- although something tells us a man with no arms who can still swing a tennis racket might just stand out on his own.

[Via Danny Choo; thanks Penny]

Update: The local police are apparently saying they're not responsible for the... uh, "mug shot," so, you know, mad props to the good samaritan out there doing their part to bring this case to a close.

If you're tired of being scammed at ATMs by kind, gentle-hearted con artists (and then forgetting it ever happened), you'll be stoked to know that Japan is looking out for you. Chiba Bank has installed phone signal jammers at four unnamed ATMs at bank branches in the Tokyo region, and while it has gone down as the first institution to go to such lengths, we highly doubt it'll be the last. It's not entirely clear what exactly the criminals were able to convince people to do via mobile, but it's probably something like "psst... get me out some cheddar and meet around back." Not that we have any experience in the field or anything...

[Via textually]

Though not quite as bad as toting the GPS module around with you, one particular marijuana farmer had to be mighty embarrassed / wondering what he ever did to deserve such bad luck when a GPS-equipped turtle meandered into his crop. As the story goes, a close friend of the police -- a box turtle with no fear of Big Brother -- just happened upon a pot stash on US park property. Clearly, Mr. Isiah Johnson (the culprit) was heavily stoned when choosing US land to farm his ganja, and now he's in custody until he's "extradited back DC to face drug charges." And you thought all you had to do was dodge those CCTV cameras...

[Via TechDigest]

Tired of the fuzz body-checking you right off your bike during Critical Mass rides? Well lucky you, New York Police Commish Ray Kelly is responding by flipping the switch on user-generated crime reports, enabling ordinary citizens to submit photos and video as evidence of criminal activity. Granted, we think it's always been the case that people could dial-a-detective if they've got a hot lead on a crime, but here Kelly specifically referred to the "fact of life" that nowadays "everybody has a camera in their telephones. When people can record an event taking place that helps us during an investigation, it's helpful." Details are not yet clear, like how much manpower it's going to take to weed through the billions of tattle-tale clips that will inevitably be sent in of Sbux line-cutters, or what codecs the NYPD will support (fingers crossed for motion-JPEG and 3GPP).

[Via The Raw Feed]

Sure, Wii is great and all, but we're guessing a man in China who tried to extort $1,400 from his parents by "kidnapping" himself and demanding a ransom after they refused to buy him a "Nintendo computer" was probably a little too infatuated with Ninety's white box. The man -- who we're hoping is more of a "boy" -- apparently hired two men to kidnap him, and was arrested after he withdrew his own ransom from an ATM. Genius. Quick tip, kids: real tennis, bowling, golf, and boxing are almost as much fun as Wii Sports, believe it or not -- and they involve just slightly less jail time.

[Via Wii Fanboy]

Well, that didn't take long. Atul Malhotra, the HP executive charged with stealing printer market data when he left IBM and sending it to his new colleagues at HP with the genius-level subject line "For Your Eyes Only," has pled guilty to one count of theft of trade secrets. Malhotra probably made the right choice -- he specifically requested the information just before he left IBM and HP itself investigated and turned him in when he was found sending it around, so the case against him was pretty airtight. It's not clear what his plea deal is, but sentencing is scheduled for October 29, and he can get up to 10 years in the clink with a fine of up to a quarter-million dollars. Crime don't pay, kids.

The printer market isn't exactly full of the most interesting news, but it's still big money, and big money tends to bring out the worst in people -- like former HP VP Atul Malhotra, who was just charged with stealing trade secrets from his former employer IBM and emailing them to other HP execs. Apparently Malhotra requested some confidential sales data two months before he went from the three-letter company to the two-letter one, and when he got there he hit up some other senior execs with the files -- marking the subject line "For Your Eyes Only." Yeah, that's an effective way to keep a lid on things. Malhotra was fired from HP in 2006, so all this went down some time ago, and HP says it actually conducted an internal investigation about the matter before firing Malhotra and reporting the theft to both IBM and the authorities. Sure, sure -- but we'll know what's up when the next HP AIO is running a Cell chip.

Before you start having a complete panic attack, let us inform you that this whole fiasco actually took place last year, but as these things have a way of going, it's just now coming to light. Reportedly, a 33-year-old captain in the Ground Self-Defense Force ganked a USB flash drive (along with ¥2,000 [$19] and a ¥10,000 [$94] airline coupon) and proceeded to "dump it." Aside from the laughably small amount of cash and prizes this guy accepted, the unfortunate part of all this is what resided on the flash drive: troop deployment maps used in Japan-US military exercises. Worse still, we get the idea that said USB key is still out there somewhere undiscovered (or unrevealed), so if you happen upon one with all sorts of undecipherable schematics on there, now you know what's up.

[Via The Register, image courtesy of University of Texas]

Passports and licenses are so last century -- these days, sophisticated crooks can change their identity on a whim, and one particular Michigan State University researcher is looking to stay one step ahead. Anil Jain has created an automatic image retrieval system dubbed Tattoo-ID, which "includes an annotated database containing images of scars, marks and tattoos" that is "linked to the criminal history records of all the suspects and convicts who have a tattoo." Essentially, the application will give law enforcement the ability to query on permanent skin markings, which sure beats manually flipping through ginormous books of images just hoping for a match. Reportedly, Jain and his team are continuing to improve the system, but there's been no word on how long it'll take before implementation can begin. Better stay on the straight and narrow, Zune Guy Microsoft Zune.

[Via TG Daily]

A criminal mastermind named Mitsuhisa Kobayashi has been arrested for a series of GPS-related car thefts in Japan. According to reports, Kobayashi was responsible for stealing eight cars in the Hyogo Prefecture, five of which he sold on the internet. The man -- a former auto factory worker -- used two ex-wives to rent the cars, and would then make copies of the keys and install GPS units or cellphones with GPS capabilities inside the vehicles. Kobayashi would use the devices to track the cars' locations, then steal them once they had been moved from the rental firm. Unfortunately, his accomplices used ID's which led the authorities right to his front door. Whoops.

[Via GPS Tracking Systems; Thanks, Rich]