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April 19th, 2024

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Bright Ideas

News of the Weird by Chuck Shepherd

By News of the Weird by Chuck Shepherd

Published July 27, 2016

Bright Ideas

The Moscow Times reported in May that bailiffs in Russia's Perm region, employing originality as yet unseen in America in attempting to collect an overdue debt, arrested the debtor's cat. The bailiffs listed the feline's value at the equivalent of $23, and the man came up with that sum the next day and took the cat home. The Federal Bailiffs Service explained that all the other "property" in the apartment was in other people's names. [Moscow Times, 5-6-2016]

Shannon Egeland, 41, already convicted in 2014 of running a mortgage-fraud operation during the 2004-2008 real-estate boom, pleaded guilty in May 2016 to the subsequent crime of deliberately having himself shot to gain his judge's sympathy (and to collect on disability insurance he had purchased the week before). Egeland, scheduled to start a 10-year sentence for the 2014 conviction, told the judge he had been assaulted by gunfire when he stopped in traffic to help a pregnant woman, but in reality he had ordered his teenage son to shoot him in the legs with a 20-gauge shotgun. [Associated Press via Yahoo News, 5-11-2016]