Danish Villagers Catch Strawberry Thieves 'Home Alone' Style

The honor system is a risky basis for a business, but some villagers in Denmark demonstrated that it works pretty well, because when they caught some unscrupulous thieves running off with money from their strawberry stand, they made sure the miscreants paid.

According to The Local it is not uncommon in Denmark to find booths selling local produce stationed along roads. Those booths do not have people working in them, but it is trusted that anybody who stops to take some produce will leave money in the till. In general, the system works.

One village has a roadside strawberry shack that operates on that model. Recently, though, the residents of one village realized that two men had been stealing the money in their till for three days in a row. On the fourth day, the thieves came back to take more money, but when one of the men went inside, all the villagers rose up from hiding and screwed a wood plank across the door of the shack, trapping the man inside.

Apparently there is not much honor among thieves, because the other criminal took off as soon as he saw his partner was trapped in the hut. He didn't make it far, though, because the villagers had set up an elaborate Home Alone-style trap made of spiked wooden planks laid across the road. After he crashed his car on the trap, he ran on foot, but police caught him. Then they went back and let his partner out of the hut and arrested them both.