Earlier this week, Kotaku reported on the story of a 19 year old kid in France named Adel, who stole a PlayStation 4 by tricking the self-checkout machine into thinking it was fruit. He then fenced the PS4 for a little over a hundred bucks, in order to finance a train ticket of some kind. He was caught by police when he returned to the scene of the crime the next day, hoping for a repeat performance.
Dude got sentenced to four months in prison, but the sentence has been suspended, meaning that he’ll only serve time if he tries to steal a Playstation from a grocery store for a third time.
So what’s a guy to do? He’s got consoles to steal, train tickets to buy, etc, but the rozzers are hip to his latest scheme. Don’t worry dude — I got you covered.
The Ol’ Emotional Support Dog Trick
To pull this one off, Adel will need to enter the grocery store with a dog that is clearly marked as an emotional support animal, with the special vest and everything; how to steal an emotional support dog will be covered in the next list.
Once he’s made it into the store, Adel and the dog make their way to the electronics section and snag a PS4. Then they’ll need to carefully maneuver themselves into a blind spot beneath one of the grocery store’s security cameras. Now, free from prying eyes, Adel can put the support dog into the PS4 box, and dress the PS4 up in the dog’s vest. From there it’s just a matter of putting the box with the dog in it back on the shelf, and casually walking out of the store with a free, cleverly disguised PlayStation 4.
Ol’ Johnny PlayStation Pants
The first step in this grift is for Adel to place an ad on Craigslist France, offering to pay people 10 euros for their empty PlayStation 4 boxes. Once he’s obtained a sufficient number of boxes — I can’t give an accurate estimate here without knowing his measurements — Adel can then fashion the boxes into a pair of fashionable cardboard pants.
The boxes must remain intact and square for this plan to work, Adel. Do not disassemble the boxes in any way. Imagine a pair of legs covered on the outside by whole boxes, rather than legs that have been slotted inside modified boxes that now resemble cardboard pant legs. The reasoning for this will be made clear in a moment.
Once the pants have been constructed, wear them to the local fruit and games store and fill up a cart with the exact same number of PlayStation 4s as there are boxes in the pants. Then, using the same blind spot as in The Ol’ Emotional Support Dog Trick, fashion the new set of PlayStations into a new pair of pants, disassemble the pants you’re currently wearing back into its component boxes, put on the new pants that are actually full of real PS4’s, put the empty boxes back on the shelf, and walk out of the store.
The money Adel makes from the stolen consoles should cover the amount he spent procuring the boxes in the first place, with enough left over to buy several train tickets.
The Ol’ “Up, Up, and Away”
The ol’ “up, up, and away” is perhaps the most sophisticated method of thievery on this list, but Adel seems like a capable kid, so I figure he’ll be able to pick up desoldering pretty quickly. Once he’s mastered the art of removing extremely tiny components from a motherboard without damaging them, all he has to do is sneak a soldering station, extension cord, Helping Hand™, and industrial-size spool of desoldering braid into the local Peach ‘n’ Play, which can be accomplished by leaving a case of beer on the loading dock at midnight on Tuesday only.
Once his setup has been transferred into the bathroom, he must then relocate the workstation into the same ol’ blind spot that all these gaming produce stores have in their security systems. From there it’s just the simple matter of disassembling a PlayStation 4, desoldering every single component from its various boards and drives, and then gently depositing said components exactly seven and one-half inches up his butt. I cannot stress how vitally important it is to get this part right.
The rest of the process is pretty self explanatory. Laissez-faire is a French term, after all!
(Also hey, for the love of God, don’t do anything on this list. That goes for everybody, not just Adel, who I’m sure has learned his lesson.)
