Hey everybody, we've got some terrifying news: Paul Blart: Mall Cop is basically a documentary. As it turns out, in the real world Average Joes blunder into vast conspiracies all the time -- and some of them are actually of absolutely incredible consequence, unlike that one caper in which Paul Blart laid a fart on those thieves of art. (OK, so we watched the movie half-asleep on an airplane.)

5 Newspaper Boy Is Paid With A Fake Nickel, Uncovers Soviet Spying Ring

Department Of Defense

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When spies are being trained, we imagine there are some obvious rules that they have to follow: Don't use your laser watch as a cat toy, use protection because it's difficult to be an expert marksman when your dick is a chemical weapons factory, and don't absentmindedly spend the fake coins that you use to hide secret documents. We don't know about the first two, but one spying ring operating out of 1950s Brooklyn certainly failed in that regard.

In June 1953, a newspaper delivery boy (known only as Jimmy) was collecting from his customers when he noticed something weird about one of the coins that he'd been given: It was really, really light. The reason soon became clear. After he dropped it on the ground, it split open and revealed a tiny photograph depicting a sequence of numbers. In any case, they clearly weren't communist numbers, so Jimmy didn't bother telling anyone about his discovery -- you know, except his friend, who mentioned it to her father, who mentioned it to his police detective friend, who mentioned it to the FBI.

FBI

This is why today's paperboys insist on being paid entirely in Bitcoin.

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After decrypting this long game of telephone, they were able to examine the coin and photograph. By the strange way that the numbers were organized, they could tell it was a message. But, to whom? Fortunately, this was the FBI. They'd have no problem busting this case wide open. It probably made a nice distraction from their day-to-day job of pissing off the civil rights movement.

It took four years.

FBI

To be fair, just the total amount of frustrated swearing alone counted for three months.

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And the breakthrough came only because so much time had elapsed that the recipient of the message, KGB Colonel Reino Hayhanen, had already defected and handed the FBI his code-breaking secrets. Holy shit, can you imagine what the Soviets could have achieved with texting technology?