Credit: Dangerous Minds

People who commit a crime don’t look like criminals. Which makes sense when you think about it, if you arouse suspicion just by being looked at, it’s probably best not to do anything suspicious. No, it’s the people that you wouldn’t look at twice, or naturally think well of, that you’ve got to be suspicious of.

Because the really smart ones will know exactly what effect they have on people and be able to use it to their advantage. It’s the basics of con artistry, they’ll know exactly what makes someone trustworthy and untrustworthy and use those little life hacks to their advantage. However, for most people, it’s things like having a smile that reaches their eyes, knowing which compliments come across as normal and which come across as creepy, how to convince people in a way that feels like encouragement rather than coercion, that kind of thing.

The “Big Belly Gang” went with something different. They threw out all ideas of manipulation and psychiatry and focused on one simple fact, that anyone who tries to tell a pregnant woman what they can and can’t do is a dickhead with absolutely no exceptions. You see, the “Big Belly Gang” were in the same “naming things” class as The Band and the producers of The Comedy, since they were a crime gang made up entirely of pregnant women and accomplices of pregnant women.

While it would be incredibly funny if they were a hardened mafia rocking up to multi-million-pound drug deals with a caveat that they might start leaking at a moment’s notice, the Big Belly Gang’s targets were slightly more achievable than that. No, they were a gang of thieves, one that was responsible for tens of thousands of shop-theft cases over the course of a decade in their native Hangzhou, China. In fact, the majority of the 3000 cases of theft in the cities’ malls occurring in 2010 alone were their responsibility

Which checks out. Mess with pregnant people at your peril.

What were the methods of the Big Belly Gang?

What’s more, this wasn’t a loose collective of people whose ill-gotten gains all went into the same pot. The gang took their jobs incredibly seriously and had a method that was very rarely strayed from. The group would work in groups of five. Three non-pregnant members who would distract staff members and security teams, then two pregnant members who would actually do the thieving, whether it was swiping things from the shelves or pick-pocketing items from other shoppers.

Then they would split, which is where things would get very surreal. Pretty much everyone who worked for the gang was a parent; thus, the loot from these jobs would be split at the one place that it would make sense for all of them to be seen together, the school gates, dropping off their kids. The loot would be split 60/40 in favour of the non-pregnant members of the team (there were more of them after all), then the next job would be planned, then off they went.

This worked for over a decade. Members of this gang were caught many times, you understand, but that’s when you get the other side of what made the Big Belly Gang such an effective crime gang. The fact that the normally ruthless Chinese justice system is particularly lenient towards pregnant women and new mothers. If they are arrested, they can plead a “special situation” and be released almost immediately. One of the members of the gang made a habit of this, getting arrested and released 47 times.

Tragically, through a series of anonymous tips and after a month-long sting operation, the gang were finally captured, and the non-pregnant members were sentenced to serious prison time.