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(A look at the less intelligent elements of the criminal underworld.)

This week's winner: Thieves steal £200,000 from Ricky Gervais with photo from The Office

When a bank call centre operator received a call from Ricky Gervais he couldn't believe his luck. But it wasn't because he was a huge The Office fan and wanted to hear the star recite a classic 'Brentism'

Instead it was because he knew Gervais would have a healthy account balance and our dodgy bank worker was stealing account details.

These were then passed on to a gang of fraudsters who planned to steal money out of accounts.

Using the account information and security details passed onto them by the bank insider, the gang would then make a high value purchase straight out of the account. In this case, their purchase of choice was gold bullion -- £200,000 of it to be precise.

And that's where their plan began to fall apart like it had been cooked up by Karl Pilkington. More after the jump.


The first problem with this heist, was that the purchase had stood out as an odd transaction - meaning that the bank contacted him to confirm the purchase.

Speaking of the incident on his new audiobook 'Law and Order' Ricky said: "The phone went and it was my bank and they said 'Is that Mr Gervais?' ... 'have you recently bought £200,000 worth of gold bullion?'"

After telling the bank staff he wasn't in the habit of buying gold bars, they realised the purchase was the work of fraudsters and called in police to investigate.

The officers in turn located the crooks who had produced a fake Ricky Gervais passport to confirm their identity for when they went to collect their shiny gains. And therein was dumb-crook-problem number two, the passport wasn't exactly the most convincing.

Police said the ID thieves had cut out a picture of Ricky playing David Brent from The Office DVD and used that in the faux passport. When a CID officer showed him the result, Gervais and the copper couldn't hold it in...

"The CID man started smirking so I went, "What?" and he showed me this passport. I tell you what, we were laughing for ten minutes," said Ricky.

"All they did was cut out the picture on the first series of The Office DVD. So it's a picture of David Brent sitting at a desk with that little smug look on his face. That's my passport in this thing."

While Ricky - who got all of his money back - didn't have to appear in court, the fraudsters were subsequently jailed.

RUNNERS UP

Thugs push trolley-riding sheep into supermarket

There are some crimes, that even while we know they are wrong, we can't help smiling at - like fools who rolled a sheep into a supermarket in a shopping trolley.

Yes, we feel obliged to use words like "stupid,' 'cruel' and 'irresponsible'... but look at it, it's a sheep in a supermarket.

The youngsters - who are now being hunted by police - were caught on CCTV as they rolled the trolley containing the sheep into an Asda store in London at 3am.

Earlier that evening they had stolen the sheep from a farm in Kent before driving to the store, where footage shows them taking photos with their mobile phones as it rolls inside.

A spokesperson for the RSPCA said that the prank will have caused the sheep "great stress." Perhaps it saw the meat aisle.

If caught, the lads face a sentence of six months in prison and/or a £5,000 fine.

Ski mask thief is too late to rob bank

There is never a good time to be a dumb crook. There is however a bad time to be a bank robber, like when, say, the bank is closed.

Police say that's exactly what happened to a man in Wisconsin, USA who - after donning a ski mask and grabbing a gun - tried to enter the Guardian Credit Union bank.

Maybe he spent a little too long picking out his mask, or maybe he got caught up in traffic, but either way when he arrived at 5:36 the bank had been closed for six minutes.

After walking through the first set of doors our tardy crook realised the next door was locked shut - so he simply turned around and went home.

Cops are now reviewing the CCTV (not pictured, that's a guy in a ski mask -- best we could do) tape and presumably once they have stopped laughing at the armed would-be robber's look of bemusement, they will start looking for him.