Sam Amico
When you’re robbing a bank, it’s good to have a getaway car. It’s probably not good to have that getaway car arrive via one of those apps that offer mobility as a service.
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But that is exactly what one bank robber did when he tried to use Uber to help him flee the scene. Yes, he actually thought this was a good idea. But hey, no one ever said criminals were smart.
Anyway, the suspect, 22-year-old Javier Rafael Camacho-Cepeda, didn’t get very far after allegedly calling an Uber, robbing a bank in Iowa, pulling a gun on the driver, and then stealing the car. He made it as far as Minnesota, about two hours from the Canadian border, before getting caught.
While the robbery took place in Des Moines, Camacho-Cepeda actually hails from Bradenton, Fla.
Javier Rafael Camacho-Cepeda Arrested
Police said Camacho-Cepeda’s decision to book the Uber made their ability to track him significantly easier. After all, one of the app’s main features is allowing customers to see where the vehicle is at all times.
“We were able to gather some information at the bank and then couple that with some information from the Uber driver to figure out very quickly who our suspect was,” Sergeant Paul Parizek with the Des Moines Police Department said, via WHO 13. “We’ve got some technology resources available to us and then just some good investigative skills and they were able to determine he was heading to the US-Canadian border.”
The Uber driver, for his part, had no idea he was taking Camacho-Cepeda to Chase Bank so that Camacho-Cepeda could rob it. The fact the driver was car-jacked more or less proved his own innocence.
“The only thing that makes this unique is that, you know, he took the Uber there, and he took the Uber away,” said Parizek. “According to the Uber driver there wasn’t a lot of indication that anything had gone wrong while he was in the bank.”
