A luckless husband from Crook, England, filed a fake mugging report with police after driving away with around $2,200 of his wife's money on the top of his car, the Daily Mail reports.
Alex Jones, 30, accidentally left the bag of cash on his car's hood while he was helping out his wife, a tax collector for a finance company, make runs to the bank one morning last September.
Desperate to deflect blame from his wife -- as well as himself -- Jones hopped in to a nearby post office and gave a detailed description of the fictional robber that he claimed had mugged him on the street just outside.
Jones then proceeded to file a five-page report with the police.
Not surprisingly, investigators who reviewed the post office's security tapes were unable to see any signs of a robbery, and they arrested Jones for "perverting the course of justice."
According to the case's prosecuting attorney, Jones fully admitted in an interview to fabricating the story, the Northern Echo reported.
Mitigating attorney David Callan conceded that Jones wasted police time, but argued that he was not acting maliciously and was motivated by extenuating circumstances.
"[Jones] and his wife were trying to get their lives back together, working on behalf of this credit company, collecting money," Callan told the Northern Echo. "He was helping out. He knew, as has happened, she would lose her job, and he came up with this ridiculous story, really on impulse. It was not premeditated."
Saying that Jones likely understood the gravity of his actions, the presiding judge ordered him to carry out 175 of unpaid community service work.
If Jones' action seemed bad, critics should remember another case that occurred around the same time in Leicester, England.
In September of 2011, Kulwant Singh Nargra, 46, was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to stealing money from his wife in order to hide his unemployment.