Security exists to keep people like us, the smelly unwashed masses away from people or objects of importance, or in some cases, just a stuck up celebrity with a ton of cash. With the amount of coin people drop for such security, you’d expect it to be pretty hard to bypass, but people are persistent and security isn’t infallible, which is why you get stories like these.
10. The fake Facebook profile that discovered the location of soldiers on tour.
It’s highly likely that everyone reading this has a Facebook profile and it’s about as likely that about 90% of you have a person on there you’ve never physically met. Maybe it’s someone from school you never really hung out with, maybe it’s a potential horizontal hug partner you added because they had a nice face, or maybe, just maybe, it someone trying to learn all of your secrets.
Such was the case with Robin Sage, a fictitious Facebook profile created by security boffin, Thomas Ryan. The profile was deliberately littered with as many red flags as possible including a paragraph explaining that Robin supposedly had 10 years of work experience in the security industry despite being only 25 years old. Ryan then used the fake profile to add hundreds of security experts, military personal and even a researcher for NASA; people you’d reasonably expect to be a least a little vigilant when accepting new friends who’d be able to see all of their personal information.
Despite the obvious disadvantage of not existing, Robin managed to befriend hundreds of people from some of America’s most secretive agencies and glean important information from their profiles, including but not limited to the exact location of soldiers on tour in Afghanistan. It’s at this point we should probably point out Ryan used a picture of a pornographic model as Robin’s profile picture.
On top of this, Ryan also created a LinkedIn profile for Robin, through which he managed to get the home phone numbers of prominent military personal and experts. Luckily, Ryan only did this as an experiment to show how easy it was and he never did anything objectionable with the information he managed to acquire. Hopefully nobody with a more uncouth agenda saw his article, or this one for that matter. We’d be in real trouble then.
9. Rubbing shoulders with famous people, by dressing as PSY.
In what is perhaps our favorite entry ever written on this site, a man managed to sneak his way into dozens of high-profile parties crammed with celebrities and the ilk by dressing as PSY (that guy who sung Gangnam style) and walking through the front door like he owned the place.
The man, later identified as professional PSY impersonator Denis Carré, by doing nothing more than slapping on a pair of sunglasses and a blue suit, managed to waltz around the Cannes Film Festival without virtually anyone stopping to question who he really was. Hell, the guy even managed to score a few free bottles of champagne out of the whole ordeal. The best part is, without the glasses, he doesn’t even really look like PSY.
After he was rumbled, in a later interview with GQ, Denis revealed that he already dressed like PSY prior to the stunt and in his own words, literally the only thing he did to fool people was “take of his socks.”
Even more hilariously, the guy only did it to raise his own profile as a PSY impersonator. Sneaking into parties, meeting celebrities and drinking tons of champagne for free was just another night’s work for this guy. How cool is that?
8. By jumping over a 100 million dollar fence, in a dress.
Jumping over a fence isn’t that impressive. People do it all the time and if Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are the documentaries we’ve been led to believe, doing a sweet-ass flip as you do so is just the icing on the cake.
What about if that fence cost over a million dollars though? Surely such a fence would be 100ft high and topped with eagles covered armed with sniper rifles and iPhones, right? Apparently not, in what has been described by most news sources as a “total failure” and by us as “a total and hilarious failure.” Two different men managed to leap over million dollar fences at two different airports without anyone stopping them. To make it even better, one of the men was wearing women’s clothing when he did it.
Yes, a man managed to leap over a fence that was part of a “100 million dollar” security system protecting Newark Liberty International Airport in high heels and a skirt, on Christmas day without anyone noticing or trying to stop him. Amazingly, the man was free to roam the airport for an entire day. Even though he was “literally caught on camera climbing the fence” (their words, not ours), no one bothered to try and catch him for 24 hours.
If that wasn’t bad enough, another man managed to bypass the same multi-million dollar system on the same day, in another airport across the country in exactly the same way. Only he did it while drunk. The real difference was this guy was caught 10 minutes later after he drunkenly tried to have a fist fight with a plane. Who says there are no more heroes left in this world?
If a drunk guy and a guy in high heels can break into an airport this easily, we’re really starting to question how serious Al Qaeda actually is.
7. By becoming the security.
As the old saying goes, if you can’t beat em, join em. Well one man took this old adage a little too far when to bypass the security surrounding a bank, he decided to simply become a security guard himself. Rather than going through years of training and all of that “hiring” nonsense though, the gentlemen, identified as world-class con man, Frank Abagnale, simply stole a guard’s uniform and stood outside the bank asking for people’s money.
Yes, it really was that easy. Frank placed a note on the overnight deposit box saying it was out-of-order and stood next to it dressed as a guard, and collected dozens of people’s already gift-wrapped money. It was as simple as that.
As Frank would later recall, no one ever said anything more than “good evening” to him the entire time he stood there, which just made things easier. It made the odds of someone catching him by asking him an awkward question practically zero. After a few hours, Frank took the sack of cash he’d collected and walked away thousands of dollars richer.
We take it back, this guy is our new hero.
6. With a Canadian Flag, dressed as Bin Laden.
Prior to his untimely make-out session with a bullet, Osama Bin Laden was probably one of the most wanted and hated men on the face of the planet. So you’d probably imagine that dressing like him would be a sure-fire way to raise suspicion.
With that in mind, you’d expect that dressing like him and trying to walk into the hotel where President Bush was staying would be a guaranteed way to have a 2 hour conversation with the business end of a nightstick. However, as unbelievable as it sounds, a group of pranksters managed to pull this off with nothing more than a limo, some brass balls and a single Canadian flag.
By lazily disguising the limo as part of a motorcade using a bunch of guys in suits and a cheap motorcycle, the pranksters were able to drive a man dressed as Osama Bin Laden through a 150 million dollar security checkpoint, and drive him almost to the front door of the hotel then-president George Bush was staying at during the 2007 APEC summit in Australia.
We only say “almost” because the pranksters themselves got worried that the whole thing was too easy and tried to turn around when it became apparent that, holy crap, they were going to get away with it. When it became clear that the police officers guarding the area really didn’t care, the guy dressed as Bin Laden actually climbed out of the car and began walking around. Only then were the group arrested and forced to leave. Hilariously, the police arrested the guy dressed as a world famous terrorist second.
Okay, can we just say that we have a lot of heroes right now?
5. Just keep showing up like you’re supposed to be there.
When Ron Avitzur was made unemployed by Apple in 1993, his immediate thoughts weren’t about getting another job but about finishing the project Apple had cancelled when they fired him. Realizing he had a fairly decent amount of savings and a security pass that still opened doors, Ron simply never stopped showing up for work in an effort to complete the project.
The project which just so happened to be the Graphing Calculator software that would eventually be bundled onto every Power Macintosh sold, was kind of Ron’s baby. He took the cancellation of the project very personally and endeavored to finish it, come hell or high water.
If you’re thinking this involved any sort of ninja-like cunning on Ron’s part, it didn’t. He just walked into his office and got to work, if people asked him if he was supposed to be there he said “no” and kept working. Amazingly, neither Ron or his partner Greg Robbins were ever asked to leave by anyone in the company. In fact, many employees working for Apple at the time thought what they were doing was entertaining and openly turned a blind eye to it.
We should point out when Ron first tried his software out on a prototype Power Mac, the screen caught fire. Even then, no one bothered to ask what he was doing. In the end, Ron managed to get his software working. Higher-ups within Apple were so impressed they began supporting his work and eventually came to ship it with Apple first Power Mac and made the software a staple of their machines for years.
Let that be a lesson to everyone reading, never let anyone tell you that you can’t do something, especially if that person is a giant billion dollar company.
4. Like James Bond
Remember that scene in Goldfinger where James Bond is wearing a wetsuit then only for him to slip it off to reveal a crisp tuxedo beneath it so he can slip into a party? As impossibly cool that scene was, it was totally based on a real thing that a real guy actually did.
When super-spy Peter Tazelaar was tasked with breaking a castle that had recently been taken over by a bunch of no-good Germans during WW2, the classy dinner jacket beneath a wetsuit technique was exactly how he pulled it off.
Unlike Bond though, after emerging from his specially made wetsuit in a pristine dinner suit, Tazelaar then had a friend pour expensive brandy over him so he could convincingly stagger past the guards in a drunken stupor. Because that ladies and gentlemen, is how a real man makes an entrance. Covered in booze.
3. By being the first person to try.
The commonly agreed upon image of Barack Obama is of a man surrounded by armed guards 24/7. Trying to get close to Obama is like trying to pet a bear cub, stupid and almost certainly guaranteed to end with you in pain and/or being eaten by a bear.
However, this constant security around Obama has become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. People tend to not try to get near him because they think it’s impossible, not because it actually is. Think of Obama as that one really hot girl you know who doesn’t have a boyfriend because everyone assumes she already has one.
This was one of the proposed reasons as to why a Washington socialite was able to gate crash one of Obama’s state dinners. The woman, identified as Michaele Salahi, snuck into Obama’s dinner with her husband to raise her profile in the hopes of appearing on a reality TV show. Seriously. Amazingly depressing facts aside, after Michaele managed to bypass security and be within spitting distance of some of America’s most powerful people, questions began flying about how exactly she’d pulled it off. Did she have knock-out gas in her purse? Did Putin owe her a favor? Did she just run really, really fast?
The most commonly accepted answer was that the pair managed to sneak past security due to a simple combination of Michaele’s generous chest measurements and the fact that no one in recent memory has ever tried to gate crash a presidential state dinner. Yes, they got away with it almost purely because no one has ever has before, so the secret service just assumed she was meant to be there.
Boy, we legitimately hope no one with dastardly intentions is reading this now.
2. With a wristband with a P on it.
You’ve probably noticed that a lot of these stories involved the person sneaking past security having access to either a swanky suit, a set of breasts or enough money to pay a security guard to pretend you’re important. Well for all of you without any of those things, there’s hope. All you really need to sneak into a fancy party full of celebrities is a marker pen.
We’re not exaggerating. Using nothing but a red wristband with a “P” hastily scrawled on it and a whole heap of confidence, a gentleman identifying himself as Paz managed to sneak into Paris Hilton‘s birthday party and steal her birthday cake. Her $3,200 birthday cake filled with expensive liqueur.
After drinking his fill at the party’s 6 open bars, Paz noticed that no one at the party had touched the huge, 70 pound cake with which Paris had been posing for pictures. Upon learning that it was most likely going to be thrown away, he and his friend Kevin picked it up, walked past the head of security, shoved it into his car and drove away.
After waking up with the several thousand dollar cake in his living room that he’d stolen from one of the wealthiest people in LA, Paz posted about it on Facebook (standard). After nursing a hangover from hell, he donated it to a local homeless shelter. The important part of this story is that none of this would have been possible without a Sharpie and a rough understanding of the alphabet, ironically two things Paris Hilton doesn’t have.
1. By being Bill Murray.
Bill Murray is a man who could pretty much get away with anything. Luckily, someone seems to have told him that, which is why there is a list a mile long of the times Bill Murray has used nothing more than his own face to do whatever the hell he likes.
Bill Murray has crashed dozens of house parties and there are many stories online of him walking into people’s houses and partying with random strangers, for no other reason that he’s Bill Murray and he can. One story involved Murray meeting a random blonde stranger who invited him to a party. Upon arriving, Bill Murray drank vodka out of a coffee mug, cleaned all of the dishes then left. Another involved him gate crashing a karaoke party and singing an Elvis song for no reason. Yet another involved him walking into a bar with the Wu-Tang Clan and taking over the bar for the evening. In an awesome twist, no matter what you ordered, Bill Murray would only give you a shot of tequila.
What makes these stories even better though, is that for every one that gets posted on Reddit or shared by the Huffington post, there’s another that no one managed to capture. Murray seems to know this and there are dozens of unconfirmed stories of him walking up to random people in the street or into parties he’s not invited to, drinking, eating or otherwise doing something stupid before saying “no one will ever believe you” and leaving.
And he keeps getting away with it because he’s Bill Murray. If that man isn’t a hero, we don’t know who is.
Unconfirmed source on his antics: http://www.billmurraystory.com/
1 Comment
RE: #4
It’s called a wetsuit because you get wet. If you want to pull off your diving suit and be dry underneath, you had better opt for the drysuit!