Westerners reacted with outrage to a claim in this column that Asian dumb criminals were dumber than American dumb criminals. I got a large number of reader emails, both of which insisted that US thieves were stupider. One said they were "the dumbest in the world bar none". I hadn’t realised what a matter of pride this was.

From a reader named John D. came news of a man named Fuller who was charged with going into his local bank and trying to cash a forged cheque for US$360 billion. The sum on the cheque was more than the total GDPs of Brunei, the Bahamas, Nepal, East Timor, the Seychelles, the Maldives and Haiti put together. "To his disappointment, the bank did not immediately organize a huge fleet of trucks to carry the cash home for him," said John. "He was surprised that the teller was suspicious and called the police." Mr Fuller was from Texas.

This was followed by a story of even more profound dumbinality from a reader named Eddy Lee. A Pennsylvania pickpocket posed for photographs with a group of victims before stealing their purses. It wasn’t even as if they deliberately took his picture. The women were taking photos of each other during a lunch party when the bag thief, who was lurking around, collecting handbags, jumped in front of the camera. Detectives had no trouble tracking him down.

These two are very good, I must admit. But the competition is tough. Asia-Pacific has some gems too. Here are some eastern hemisphere cases:

1. A snatch-thief in Sydney, Australia, grabbed a bag and ran away with it, not realizing that it contained a large, highly poisonous snake. Police immediately started looking for an open sack and a corpse.

2. A thief on the run from police in Nagoya, Japan, decided to elude capture by disguising himself as a schoolgirl. He donned the sort of sailor suit school uniform familiar to manga readers. This turned out to be a seriously bad idea for a tall, stocky man with heavy five o’clock shadow. He was caught easily.

3. A Hong Kong thief surnamed Chan, 34, pleaded innocent to a charge of theft he was facing at a court hearing, but couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to steal a court official’s handbag. Wrong time, wrong place.

4. Australian motorist Robert James Thompson, 59, tried to escape driving penalties by claiming that his wife committed the offences, although the weak part in his argument was the fact that she died four years earlier, and thus no longer used the car that often.

Which side of the planet has dumber criminals? Hard to say, but I think that Asia-Pacific criminals are definitely less predictable than US ones, particularly if we include Australasia, which has produced some creative criminals lately.

For example, a man in New Zealand was arrested on a charge of attack with a deadly hedgehog. The 27-year-old was told that the crime could attract a sentence of five years in prison.

No doubt a new line will be added to the standard police manual of statements to use when dealing with armed assailants: "Drop the hedgehog and come out with your hands up."

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