Weird news - ISIS everywhere

ISIS is the terror organization that has struck fear in a large section of the world. Besides its brutal tactics in the war zones of Syria and Iraq, it has even struck in many parts of Europe, and even had an attack in the United States where a massacre was committed by somebody pledging allegiance to ISIS. Further, the terror organization is very much present on social media and also does a lot of effort in trying to attract disenchanted westerners, something which is very scary for these societies.
However, in order to protect from these terror organizations, sometimes efforts are taken which seem like overkill. There is a constraint on suspicious sounding financial transactions, which sounds great but sometimes leads to weird situations, or innocent people are removed from flights because their names are similar to terror suspects or because somebody is suspicious of them. For example, in this incident, a person transferring money to his dog walker was not able to do since he put in his dog's name in the comment, and the bank thought that the name of the dog was very similar to another name for ISIS (link to article):

Bruce Francis, 55, from San Francisco, was transferring $374 from his account to his dog walker and wrote his dog’s name ‘Dash’ in the memo line, as he has done every month for the past couple of years. Chase Bank blocked Francis’ online payment because his pitbull mix’s moniker loosely resembles the terrorist network ‘Daesh’, another name for Islamic State. Bank officials thought ‘Dash’ was a hair too close to ‘Daesh’, the Arabic term for the Islamic State or IS, and cancelled the payment. The dog walker notified Francis ten days later that she still had not been paid.

Weird news - Man spent money received accidentally from bank

Suppose a person is living a middle class life, and then suddenly gets a large amount of money deposited into his account. The next steps depend on the amount of money. Some months back, there was a case where an ATM in Britain was loaded with 20 pounds bills rather than 10 pound bills, and a number of people benefited before the bank realized. However, the bank decided not to pursue cases with the people who had benefited, letting them take the extra money. But when the money involved is much higher, the bank will take decisive action.
So it was in this case where a man received a huge amount of money in his account, and over a period of time, withdrew the money before the bank realized. And before the bank could take back the money from him, he went on the run along with his girl-friend, with the bank getting him declared as an international fugitive, spending more than 2 months on the run before he was arrested in Hong Kong where he had run away from New Zealand. Now he is back on trial (link to article):

A New Zealand gas station owner turned international fugitive has been sentenced to four years and seven months in prison after stealing millions of dollars accidentally deposited into his bank account. Hui "Leo" Gao, dubbed the "accidental millionaire," sparked a global manhunt after fleeing New Zealand with his girlfriend Kara Hurring in April 2009. Gao had applied for overdraft financing for the gas station he co-owned with his mother in Rotorua, New Zealand, court documents said. The bank approved his application with a $100,000 limit, however while inputting the figure a bank employee made a clerical error and gave him access to 100 times the intended amount.

Weird news - Hacking into a bank without any special skills

Banks routinely tout their extra high security, with most instances talking about bit length (256 and above) encryption keys. Given the nature of business that banks are involved in, ensuring that there is a high amount of security is also critical. Also, given today's fast paced world, there is a need for banks to ensure that they remain on all the time, with no delays. A downtime can cause problems to many customers of the bank, and can cause them to take their business to other banks along with penalties to the bank concerned, especially if their security measures are not as strong as they should be.
So what do you do when it seems that a person can stop a bank's operations or trigger a stoppage on the operations of the bank, such as in this case when a person called into a number that was tied to a back end service machine in the bank and entered some codes that caused the software to trigger an alarm and stoppage of services. The person was arrested by the police, but finally exonerated by the court after there was no malice detected in the 'hack' (link to article):

A Frenchman has been cleared of wrongdoing after a court accepted he accessed the Bank of France's internal telephone systems by accident. An unnamed 37-year-old Breton longed to avoid premium-rate calls while using Skype back in 2008, and set about hunting for a cheap-rate gateway number to the public networks. Judges sitting in a criminal court of Rennes, northwest France, dismissed the case against the man on Thursday, citing the prosecution team's failure to demonstrate any criminal intent in his actions.

Trying to cash a check for $360 billion

The most successful criminals are the ones who are never detected, and the most seemingly obvious way to do this is in way that seems like normal behaviour; don't be too flashy and don't ask for outrageous things. Hence, for example, people who try to steal from banks find manipulating the system a much less detectable method rather than taking a gun and trying to hold up the teller. Somebody should try telling all this to this gentleman who tried to present a forged check, not for a figure like $1,000 dollars but for the figure of $360 billion.

Charles Ray Fuller must have been planning one big record company. The 21-year-old North Texas man was arrested last week for trying to cash a $360 billion check, saying he wanted to start a record business, authorities said. Tellers at the Fort Worth bank were immediately suspicious — perhaps the 10 zeros on a personal check tipped them off, according to investigators.
Fuller said his girlfriend's mother gave him the check to start a record business, but bank employees who contacted the account's owner said the woman told them she did not give him permission to take or cash the check, according to police. In addition to forgery, Fuller was charged with unlawfully carrying a weapon and possessing marijuana, Fort Worth police Lt. Paul Henderson said.

This guy belongs in a special class; not only did he try to rip-off the mother of his girlfriend, he did so for an amount that the bank could not possibly fulfill and that the lady's account would not have. Additionally, he was actually carrying both a weapon and marijuana !

Thieves steal sperm sample

Thieves will try to steal anything valuable, but maybe they need to learn that not everything that is valuable can be sold. An example is something that is of great personal value to one person, but no value to anything else. Another example is of something like sperm samples from a sperm back, that cannot be sold since any user will want to have the history of the sample. So, the thief steal sperm samples and tries to sell them to a doctor, but no doctor would want to buy something like this since they would want to know previous details of the sperm sample, including the profile of the donor:

A laboratory technician who allegedly tried to make a quick buck by stealing samples from the sperm bank where he worked has been arrested after a suspicious doctor tipped off police.
The doctor contacted police because they [doctors] usually refer patients to infertility clinics for treatment. They are never approached with sperm vials on sale. Infertility experts in Mumbai were astounded by the alleged theft.

And now these would be thieves are facing fines and jail terms for trying to sell something that could not be sold.

Treating a bank robber with kindness

This is a new tactic about how to deal with bank robbers. Till now the established method of dealing with bank robbers has been to treat them gingerly, not confronting them, and to take measures that essentially deal with trying to catch the robber later. This would include either activating an alarm and/or dropping an exploding dye into the cash bag.
Now, there is a new element dropped in these measures. This measure is excessive friendliness. The premise is that an overdose of courtesy will unnerve would-be robbers and get them to rethink the crime. This is part of the 'Safecatch' system created by an FBI Special Agent and being adopted by banks in the Washington area. The concept is that a normal customer thinks friendliness and courtesy is great; but a robber really gets scared and does not understand the reasons for the same.
As an example, in a bank, when a robber walked in, the manager greeted him, and guided the robber to an equally friendly teller. This must have worked, for the robber asked for a roll of quarters and left.