Sometimes it is hard to believe the plans people come up with to try and make money. Case in point: Police say an Arizona couple with over 400 overdue library books was recently busted after trying to sell them to a secondhand bookstore.
It seemed like such a foolproof plan, too.
According to court documents, the strange saga began when Mesa Public Library officials contacted local police on May 19 and reported that a woman was trying to resell the books to Half Price Books.
Mesa Public Library officials called the police after the woman brought 19 books into the store with Mesa Public Library labels on them. Suspicious, the store contacted the library. The woman left the store without the books after the bookseller declined to purchase them, according to Fox 11 News.
The store later provided the police with five separate receipts from transactions with the woman, who reportedly sold 423 books to the bookshop between May 7 and May 14.
After being contacted, the library collected the books the woman had left behind at the store and scanned them. They discovered that a man with two library accounts had checked them out. According to court documents, one account had been terminated because $1,565 worth of books were never returned. The second account had 66 overdue books.
Upon further review of the couple’s accounts, library officials discovered that the two accounts owed almost $6,500.
Police arrested the couple after they returned to the scene of the alleged crime
When Mesa library staff noticed the pair had returned on Aug. 10, they called the police. During police questioning, the woman reportedly acknowledged that they stole the books to resell them. Police took both into custody and charged them with theft, a class four felony, and trafficking stolen property, a class two felony.
Detectives are still looking into the case, according to ABC News. Authorities said they believe the case still involves a large number of unrecovered volumes from the Mesa Public Library.
To help police identify the books involved in the theft, the Mesa Police Department is urging anyone who may have unintentionally bought a stolen book from the Mesa Public Library, or who possesses one of the stolen books, to contact them.