Life imitates the movies

This scene from the Thomas Crown Affair is simply insanely cool. So cool, in fact, that a real life thief used the idea to rob an armored car:

MONROE, Wash. – In a move that could be right out of a Hollywood movie, a brazen crook apparently used a Craigslist ad to hire a dozen unsuspecting decoys to help him make his getaway following a robbery outside a bank on Tuesday. He then made his escape in an inner tube on the Skykomish River.

A $26/hour job listing in Craig's List lined up a bunch of guys all wearing the same thing. Bad Guy does the job, gets away in the confusion. Sounds like he didn't even pay his "employees":

Mike showed up along with about a dozen other men dressed like him, but there was no contractor and no road work to be done. He thought they had been stood up until he heard about the bank robbery and the suspect who wore the same attire.

Via The Register, which adds:

Monroe cops probing the caper confess themselves baffled, and have called in federal assistance to help them backtrace the Craigslist ad and emails.

We'll see whether the Bad Guy has creative l33t intarwebz cover-yer-tracks skillz, too.

In the security biz, we call the decoys "False Positive" events - they look like the real thing, but actually aren't. This was actually an effective implementation of a strategy that relies on an excessive False Positive rate to mask the actual attack.

You hate to root for the Gad Guy (especially after hearing that he maced the Armored Car driver), but this is pretty clever - one for the history books.