What do you do when you’re a drug dealer and your buyers keep your $40? Well, if you’re one simpleton in Athens, Alabama, you call the police.

According to Athens police Captain Marty Bruce, that’s what the simpleton, identified as 19-year-old Joshua James Montgomery, of 22094 Compton Road, in Athens, did on August 23.

Montgomery, who also gave police an address of 901 Fifth Avenue, Decatur, flagged down Lieutenant Ron Ultz at 2:15 PM on Hine Street, close to Market Street, according to Bruce. Bruce also said that the simpleton told him that two men robbed him, and he identified them to police.

Sergeant Trevor Harris investigated the mugging and discovered that our simpleton was in reality the victim of two-timing.

Bruce alleges that Montgomery gave $40 to 22-year-old Cody James Barnes, of 1303 Elm Street, Lot 17, Athens, and 22-year-old Adam Wayne Blankenship, of 1604 Grace Avenue, Athens.

Bruce said that Montgomery wanted the not-so-dynamic duo to buy him painkillers in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart.

“Barnes acted like he was trying to buy pills, but came back and told Montgomery he couldn’t get any,” Bruce said.

Police charged the thoughtless threesome with conspiracy to commit a controlled-substance crime, and added a charge of filing a false report to Montgomery’s rap sheet.

Blankenship and Barnes were being held in the Limestone County Jail in lieu of $5,000 bond each.

Montgomery is out on bail, but the amount was not disclosed.

Here’s a tip: don’t call the police to report a robbery if you are the one committing it.

Case in point: A woman in the Jiangsu Province in China didn’t follow this advice. She phoned the police to report a robbery, except for one small problem: she was the one committing the robbery in the first place, according to the Procuratorial Daily newspaper.

The woman, identified only by her last name, Fang, was getting ready to return to her hometown from Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, where she worked, to visit her ill grandmother. She was packing up things in her office before leaving when noticed some bags on the table. She swiped two cell phones and 120 yuan (about $15.07 in U.S. currency).

Fang was at the train station the following day only to discover that she didn’t have enough money to buy a ticket. So her brilliant idea was to call the police to report that she had been robbed there and had no money for her trip home.

The cops soon arrived and asked her questions about the robbery, but her poor description of the robbery soon got their suspicions up. The police then searched her bag and there were the two cell phones. When Fang was asked what kind of phones they were, she couldn’t answer.

Our self-tattletale was arrested for theft by the local prosecutor’s office.

A guy in Elmwood Park, New Jersey, who robbed a Wachovia Bank there made one small, but costly, mistake–he didn’t remember to bring a bag to put the stolen money in.

Our forgetful felon, who was wearing a long curly-haired wig and sunglasses and had what looked like a black 9-millimeter handgun, demanded money from tellers after he entered the bank a little before 11:00 AM on August 25, Elmwood Park Police said. He then hopped the tellers’ counter and pilfered $1,385 in cash.

However, as the unidentified man ran away from the crime scene, he ended up dropping at least $1,195, or about 86% of what he had filched.

Police found the cash, which the wind had blown onto lawns and driveways, when they combed the area an hour later. Investigators declined to comment on the rest of the investigation since it was ongoing.

If you’re going to pass counterfeit money at the State Fair, don’t take a picture of yourself with your funny money. 

A suspected counterfeiter has been busted in Sacramento, California, after doing just that, in a photo booth.

According to investigators, this was a classic example of how to get caught committing a crime.

Sometime this past week, police there said that a teen was passing counterfeit $20s and $100s.

A state fair vendor, who was the victim of the alleged counterfeiter, told state fair Police Chief Robert Craft that the suspect was carrying with him a photograph.

When cops went to the fair’s photo kiosk to investigate, they said they found a picture taken of state fair staff of the unidentified 17-year-old suspect with his friends and holding wads of bogus bills.

“This is a dumb crook thing. You go in and have your picture taken, become a 10 Most Wanted here. Give me a break,” Craft said.

A couple days later, with police knowing exactly who they were looking for, authorities said that the suspect came back to the fair and attempted to pass another counterfeit bill.

He was immediately arrested, reportedly with $400 in counterfeit bills in his pocket.

“How stupid is that? Unbelievable,” fairgoer Betty Wells said.

All authorities said is that our dumb crook is facing two felony counts of possessing or passing fake money.

State fair police said in the last two years, they have caught every single person who has tried to pass phony bills to state fair vendors.

Woodside, California, is probably not a good place to ask for gas money for a stolen van.

Two teenagers from nearby San Jose with a stolen van parked it in front of Robert’s market in downtown Woodside on August 15 when the vehicle ran out of gas, Lieutenant Ken Jones of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office said.

The two teens attempted to ask for gas money in front of said market, then walked to a nearby Chevron station and filled a container with gas.

When they left, they got an alert witness’s suspicions up whereupon the witness called the phone number on the side of the white Chevrolet van, which belongs to Jose’s Landscaping — owned by Jose Galleloes of San Jose, who said that the van had been stolen from there, according to Lieutenant Jones.

The witness called the cops, and sheriff’s deputies showed up to arrest the two teens, one of whom was identified as 18-year-old Joseph Broussard-Mosley, and a 17-year-old, who was not identified because he is a minor.

Lieutenant Jones said that deputies found a loaded handgun in the juvenile’s possession.

The suspects were charged with auto theft and other offenses. Broussard-Mosley is being held at the San Mateo County jail, and the juvenile is being held at the Hillcrest detention facility in Belmont.

A man who was wearing a long denim dress with his hair streaked robbed a bank inside a grocery store in Palm Springs, CA, and walked out with an unspecified amount of cash.

The man stole the cash around 5:50 PM on August 25 at a Bank of America inside an Albertson’s in the 1700 block of North Sunrise Way.

Police arrived two minutes after they received the call, but our dummy dressed in drag was nowhere in sight.

The unidentified man was was described as medium built, 5-foot-9, wearing a long denim dress with shoulder-length black hair with blonde highlights, large sunglasses, and carrying a duffle bag.

Anyone who had information was requested to call the Palm Springs Police Department at (760) 323-8115.

Police in Vienna, Austria, say that a man thought a government building was a bank and tried to rob it.

The unidentified 34-year-old man mistook a municipal building in the southern village of Poggersdorf for a bank because it had an automated teller machine in the lobby, according to Herman Klammer, head of the criminal division at Carinthia province’s police department.

Klammer also said that the man fled the building after a woman he reportedly threatened with an air gun told him that she did not have any money and that he made a mistake.

“At first, I thought he was making a bad joke,” Austrian broadcaster ORF quoted the woman, Helga Aichwalder, as saying.

The man was arrested almost immediately after the incident that took place August 22 and has owned up to his actions.

“This is an extremely odd case. I’ve never come across anything like this,” Klammer said.