Tag: theft

Toronto homeowner charged after opening fire during potential car theft

The case has raised the issue of how Canadians can protect themselves, their families and their property when faced with a potential break-in or theft.

Earlier this year in Vaughan, a homeowner got his gun out to protect himself and his family during a home invasion. York Regional Police did not press charges in that case.

The Toronto case has also renewed attention on “Castle Law” protections in Canada. The idea has gained support from some Canadians who believe people should be able to defend themselves and their property when police cannot respond immediately.

Police response times can be 10 to 12 minutes, and an armed attacker can do significant harm during that time.

The broader concern raised was that Canadians defending themselves, their families, homes and businesses can face criminal charges while dealing with people who have entered their property.

Keep reading

Thieves Steal Four Renaissance Artworks in Sicilian Museum Heist

Thieves stole four works attributed to the Sicilian Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina from a regional museum in the Sicilian city of Messina on the Italian Ferragosto holiday, the news agency LaPresse reported Sunday.

The thieves bypassed alarm and security systems Saturday evening at the MuMe regional museum to make off with three of the five surviving panels of the San Gregorio Polyptych, dated from 1473, as well as the double-sided panel depicting the Virgin Mary and dead Christ in Pietà, which was removed from an armored display case, LaPresse reported.

“We are devastated by what happened. They were two of Antonello da Messina´s most important and best-known works. It is a tremendous loss for the museum, the city, the community and the art world,” MuMe director Marisa Mercurio told the ANSA news agency. She said the theft occurred just before 10 p.m.

The Italian government in March bought a devotional painting titled “Ecce Homo” by da Messina for $14.9 million from Sotheby’s auction house in New York – raising the profile of the early Renaissance painter.

Lynda Albertson, an art-crime analyst, said the works are instantly recognizable, impeding any effort to sell them through reputable channels.

“Stealing an Antonello may be far easier than selling one. If these are ordinary thieves, they will soon discover that – to their cost,” Albertson, who is the chief executive of the ARCA art crimes research association, told the Italian daily La Repubblica. She said such famous artworks often pass from one criminal to another, serving as collateral for other illicit activity.

The museum was closed Sunday while investigators gathered evidence. Neither museum officials nor the Carabinieri could immediately be reached for comment.

The Ferragosto holiday, which marks the feast of the Assumption of Mary, marks the height of the Italian summer holiday season.

The theft comes just days after police in the northern Italian city of Parma announced that they had recovered three stolen artworks by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse worth about 10 million euros ($11.5 million). Five people have been detained in the March 22-23 theft from the Magnani Rocca Foundation located in the Parma province.

Keep reading

Valuable Stolen Picasso Found Hanging on Milwaukee Apartment Wall After Tenant Was Evicted

A stolen Pablo Picasso print worth $50,000 has been claimed by its rightful owner after it was discovered by a landlord in Wisconsin while cleaning out a vacant apartment.

Gallery owner Bill DeLind thought the print by the iconic Spanish artist was gone for good after it was stolen in 2018 from his Milwaukee showroom.

Then, last week, he got a call from police. They wanted him to took at the reduction-style image that a Milwaukee landlord had discovered while turning around one of his apartments.

DeLind knew immediately what he was looking at. It was his stolen “Torero” print, one of 30 known to exist signed by Picasso, the New York Post and other outlets reported.

“I was overwhelmed,” DeLind said Friday. “I was at a loss for words. It was an overwhelming moment for me.”

“It was indeed mine,” he added. “It came back full circle.”

The landlord, Tim Dertz, told WISN-TV that he found the print while cleaning out an apartment of a tenant he had to evict.

“It was kind of in a weird spot hanging on a wall,” Tim Dertz told the station, per the Post’s report. “It looked like it had been there for a long, long time because it had tons of dust across the top of it.”

The landlord said he showed it to an antique dealer friend who recognized it as an authentic Picasso.

Dertz handed it over to police, who then contacted DeLind.

The Milwaukee Police Department told the Post Friday that the statute of limitations for theft and property crimes is generally six years. Still, the case remains under investigation, the department said.

Keep reading

Former FBI Agent Charged With Stealing Nearly $1 Million In Crypto, Asked ChatGPT How To Hide It

A supervising U.S. FBI agent who worked in intelligence at the national headquarters has been arrested and accused in a federal court filing of stealing more than $1 million in cryptocurrency.

The high-level special agent, identified as Patrick Steven Yarmoch, allegedly turned himself in to agency colleagues, reporting that he dug crypto keys from FBI systems to make as many as a dozen transfers to himself from accounts tied to foreign individuals he’d investigated, according to an August 1 account filed with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

“During the afternoon of July 28, 2026, Yaroch contacted DOJ Employee 1 via Signal and requested to meet to discuss personal matters,” prosecutors said in the complaint.

“Upon meeting DOJ Employee 1 at FBI headquarters, Yaroch immediately started to break down as he told his story.”

Yarmoch — who held a “top secret” security clearance — had worked in counterintelligence, specifically with an investigative unit that focused on an unnamed “adversary nation,” according to the court filing, which noted he was suspended for a couple of days before being fired and arrested on July 31.

The resident of Ashburn, Virginia, had worked as a supervisory special agent at FBI headquarters in Washington, specifically in its counterintelligence and espionage division. He’d previously worked for years out of Boston, where he’d been in a national-security unit investigating the adversary nation referenced in the court filing.

In handling the digital assets, Yarmoch was said to use accounts with Kraken and also Suilend, the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem for the Sui blockchain, via a Slush wallet.

The FBI searches of his computer and phone records revealed some of his recent questions to AI apps, including, “If you had a bucket of money (around $1 million) and you wanted to leave the USA and become a resident or citizen of an EU country, what would you do?”

To which the app allegedly recommended Portugal as a favored destination.

Investigators also located travel plans for Yarmoch and his family to go to Portugal next month, and located the power of attorney forms for Portugal.

“Yaroch stated he was not planning to funnel money into Portugal,” the complaint said.

“Yaroch told FBI WF Agents that his family had a trip planned to Portugal in September 2026 to meet friends. Yaroch realized he might not be able to attend the trip but stated he hoped his wife and child would still go on the trip.”

Later searches included whether Americans need a visa when connecting through Turkey and help drafting a follow-up email about a job opportunity and life in Greece.

He was also said to take recent trips to Germany, and Grenada that he hadn’t reported internally, in violation of FBI rules.

Yarmoch was placed in detention in Alexandria, Virginia.

Keep reading

“Nothing Is 100%”: CZ Warns Bitcoin Holders After $89 Million Coldcard Wallet Exploit

A third wave of thefts against Bitcoin wallets built on flawed Coldcard firmware ran through Saturday morning, lifting observed losses to roughly 1,367 BTC – close to $89 million – drained from 4,585 addresses since Thursday.

As Cyberkendra.com reports, the size is not the interesting part. The third wave is the first one designed to be hard to follow, and that shift tells self-custody holders more about what happens next than any dollar figure does.

Galaxy Research published the wave-three findings early Sunday. Between 12:23 UTC on July 31 and 06:42 UTC on August 1, across blocks 960,396 to 960,471, another 207.73 BTC left 1,912 addresses. That is roughly a tenth of a coin per victim.

Wave one, which opened at 01:10 UTC on July 30 and closed 41 minutes later, took 1,082.65 BTC from 1,195 addresses — nearly a full coin each.

Wave two, on July 31, collected just 76.16 BTC from 1,478 addresses.

Median losses tell the same story more bluntly: 0.270 BTC in wave one, 0.010 in wave two, 0.013 in wave three. The operator is now emptying wallets worth a few thousand dollars apiece and still finding enough of them to spend ten hours sweeping.

Waves one and two were easy to map because the attacker made them easy.

Both funneled coins through a handful of shared collector addresses into P2WPKH holding wallets (pay-to-witness-public-key-hash — plain single-key SegWit outputs, fully visible on chain).

Wave three abandoned that.

Each victim’s coins went to their own destination, and the proceeds now sit in 293 separate P2WSH vaults (pay-to-witness-script-hash, a format that keeps its spending conditions hidden until the first time the coins move). The sweeper also batched an average of 6.37 victims per transaction, where wave one took exactly one at a time, and scanned only the default derivation path instead of testing several branches per seed. Even the fee constant changed — 30 sat/vB in wave one, 50 and 10 in wave two, roughly 200 then exactly 10 in wave three.

That is either the same crew rebuilding after being enumerated in public, or a second crew grinding the same broken key space on its own.

The falling average haul suggests the profitable end of the vulnerable key space is picked over. That is cold comfort. Wave three’s median take of 0.013 BTC is the clearest evidence yet that no balance is now small enough to be beneath the scanner’s notice — and the sweeping had not stopped three days in.

Keep reading

California Man Arrested After Police Catch Him Stealing Unvoted Ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona

A man from California was arrested in Scottsdale, Arizona, on felony charges after US Postal Inspectors caught him stealing mail, including unvoted mail-in ballots, from a USPS collection box.

The suspect, 26-year-old Richard Anthony Ramos Jr. of Stockton, California, was arrested on July 21 with several ballots in his car.

Notably, the Primary elections in Arizona were also held on July 21.

The scheme reportedly involved using a cardboard box into the collection bin to trap outgoing mail, which he would then fish out.

It is unclear whether his target was the mail-in ballots and what he intended to do with them.

Keep reading

Unlicensed Trans Funeral Home Director Accused of Stealing $2.2M Estate and Keeping Organs in Bucket Confronted by Reporters in Court: “Im a Celebrity. Get Out of My Face B*tch”

A Houston funeral home director appeared in court on Friday on multiple felony charges involving a scheme to steal more than $2.2 million from a deceased man’s estate. 

Unique Mica Green-Battle is accused of forging documents to claim he is the spouse and successor of the victim, Lawrence Gammon. The forged documents include a fake will, a falsified death certificate, forged probate documents, and fraudulent filings used to gain control of the estate, according to Fox 26.

Police executed a search warrant of Green-Battle’s business in November 2025 after families accused the funeral home of mishandling corpses and committing fraud.

During a search of the business, investigators reportedly found human organs in a bucket and boxes of cremated remains.

Green-Battle was also operating the business without a license after the license expired in 2021 and was revoked in August 2025.

The apparently trans funeral director appeared in court on Friday, where a judge set bond at $800,000. Green-Battle was released after posting the bond.

“Court documents dating back to 1998 list Green-Battle at different times as male and female. The Chronicle could not confirm Green-Battle’s gender identity or pronouns. Harris County Jail records listed Green-Battle under the name Michael James Green as of Wednesday morning,” the Houston Chronicle reported.

Keep reading

Taxpayer Millions Couldn’t Stop Seven Save A Lot Grocery Stores From Going Dark In Crime-Ridden Chicago

Save A Lot shuttered seven locations across Chicago’s crime-ridden South and West sides over the weekend, once again exposing the dysfunction of a metro area run by unhinged progressives. City officials poured millions of dollars into the grocery outlets in hopes of improving food access, only to watch the stores remain unprofitable amid persistent theft.

Local outlet ABC 7 reports “frustration, anger, and concern” among the community as Save A Lot shuttered seven stores on Saturday, with many residents saying this would reduce their access to food.

The outlet noted:

Save A Lot began a partnership with retail company Yellow Banana in 2023 in an effort to keep grocery stores open on the city’s South and West sides and combat food deserts.

A company spokesperson cited financial struggles and cuts to SNAP benefits as reasons for the closures. In a statement, the company said, “We are committed to the wellbeing of the communities we serve. We will continue to engage with City and Community leaders to explore ways to provide access to quality food and services for residents, and we are actively supporting impacted Yellow Banana team members throughout the transition.”

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Yellow Banana had a $26 million redevelopment agreement with the city of Chicago and received more than $13 million in taxpayer financing to renovate and reopen Save A Lot locations. The rest of the funding came from federal grants and loans.

Despite the debate on X over whether the seven locations qualified as “government grocery stores,” they were privately owned and operated but supported with taxpayer funding. Even with public backing, the stores failed to turn a profit. Theft was likely a major factor in the shutdowns, although the operator cited broader financial pressures and reductions in SNAP benefits.

Add Save A Lot to the growing list of retailers reducing their exposure to Chicago, alongside Walgreens, Aldi, and Walmart. Walgreens and Aldi explicitly cited theft, burglaries, and violent incidents in certain closures, while Walmart and Save A Lot pointed more broadly to persistent losses and financial headwinds.

The accelerating retail exodus suggests Chicago’s progressive governing model enforced by City Hall is backfiring. Without basic public safety and a commercially viable operating environment, progressives risk even broader food and pharmacy deserts in low-income areas as businesses want no part of lawless neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, socialist politicians gaining power at the local level are promoting taxpayer-funded supermarkets and “free food for everyone.” Yet history offers little evidence that government-run grocery models can remain efficient, financially sustainable, or responsive to consumers without persistent subsidies. But, of course, these politicans pitch ‘this time is different’ … 

Keep reading

ANOTHER ONE: Indian Illegal Alien Trucker with Valid California CDL Busted Hauling Nearly $3 Million in Stolen Military-Grade Powder – Now in ICE Custody

Here we go again.

An illegal alien from India who possessed a valid California commercial driver’s license is now in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody after authorities caught him transporting nearly $3 million worth of stolen tungsten oxide powder.

The suspect, identified as 31-year-old Deepak Kumar, was arrested in Greenfield, Indiana, after police tracked his tractor-trailer traveling westbound on Interstate 70.

The truck was wanted in connection with a massive cargo theft reported in Pennsylvania on June 25.

According to the Greenfield Police Department, Kumar is suspected of using fraudulent documents to obtain nearly 40,000 pounds of tungsten oxide powder valued at a staggering $2,857,500.

The powder was being shipped to Mitsubishi Materials Corporation in Japan.

Keep reading

Louisiana Pastor Convicted of Stealing Over $340,000 from His Congregations to Fund Gambling, Meals and Lavish Living

A Louisiana pastor known for his social media presence and motivational messaging has been convicted of defrauding his own congregations out of more than $340,000, using church funds to bankroll gambling, dining, and other personal expenses.

Dale Sanders, 56, of Kenner, was found guilty Friday, July 17, 2026, of a 25-count superseding indictment charging him with wire fraud, access device fraud, and obstruction of a federal investigation following a five-day jury trial before U.S. District Judge Brandon S. Long. The conviction was announced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

According to evidence presented at trial, Sanders defrauded two congregations he led, Second New Guide Missionary Baptist Church in Metairie (identified as Church A) and Fifth African Baptist Church in New Orleans (Church B), by withdrawing funds and transferring money from church bank accounts into accounts he controlled.

He also used a church debit card for unauthorized personal transactions, pocketing cash, goods and services totaling over $340,000 that he had no right to.

The money bankrolled his casino gambling, hotel stays, meals and living expenses. The scheme stretched from around 2020 to 2024.

Prosecutors detailed specific transactions in the superseding indictment, including a $5,000 check from the New Orleans church, a $1,172 charge at a Hard Rock Hotel in Florida, $1,300 in charges at a Mississippi casino, and even a $226 veterinary bill in Kenner, among many others, according to NOLA.com.

Sanders was also convicted of obstructing the federal investigation by providing a falsified record in response to a grand jury subpoena.

Keep reading