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Why It's Unwise to Livestream Yourself Robbing an Ice Cream Truck

You're not exactly setting yourself up for a successful getaway, as two Utah teenagers recently learned when they Periscoped their Robin Hood-esque heist.
Hilary Pollack
Los Angeles, US

There was a time when the tale of Robin Hood was one that symbolized righteousness and selflessness, as the heroic criminal swiped goods from the overly privileged and redistributed them to the oppressed and impoverished. Though he risked his own hide and freedom, he fed the hungry and outsmarted the man time and time again.

That's kind of the key to being Robin Hood, though—outsmarting the man. And if you livestream yourself stealing an ice cream truck, you're not really setting yourself up for a successful getaway.

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You may be familiar with Periscope, a new Twitter-owned app that allows just about anyone with a smartphone to cast out a livestream of whatever weird thing they happen to be doing at any particular moment—attending a concert, enjoying a ride on a sailboat, making out with a banana, stealing some extremely expensive property.

Enamored of this exciting new development in social media, two 16-year-old boys in Utah decided to implement Periscope to share their wild and crazy adventure of heisting big tubs of ice cream out of the trailer of an unattended truck. Take that, ice cream barons!

READ: Ice Cream Tastes Great But Brings Out the Worst in Humanity

The problem: anyone in the vicinity can tune into a Periscope stream and watch you go ape, like a sort of mobile Chat Roulette with less anonymity. And a user in West Weber, Utah, didn't like what they saw, what with those ne'er-do-wells nicking barrels of Rocky Road for kicks.

Well, for more than kicks. When police apprehended the teens, they admitted to taking the loot but said that they had "randomly placed the tubs of ice cream on the front porches of some of their neighbors as a gift," according to a statement shared on the Weber Sheriff's Facebook page.

JUVENILES WITH STICKY FINGERS CAUGHT IN ICE CREAM TRUCK BURGLARY AFTER POSTING HEIST ON-LINE Just before midnight on… Posted by Weber C Sheriff on Monday, July 13, 2015

Despite these random acts of creamy kindness and senseless acts of frozen dessert beauty, authorities were not so amused that they offered any breaks. The boys will still have to head to juvenile court on charges of burglary and theft.

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It just goes to show, kids: the times are a'changing, though nabbing ice cream out of a truck hardly qualifies as "stealing from the rich," and Weber County—with a relatively low poverty rate of about 12 percent percent—isn't terribly poor.

READ: The Best Ice Cream Gets You a Little Drunk

You could say that that's where the boys went wrong, but it was more likely that it was the whole livestreaming thing.

Next time, they might be better off using Snapchat. You never know who's watching.

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