26ABC network
In 2010, the Walt Disney Company nearly sold the ABC network. The sale was canceled because of an FBI investigation into insider trading.
27. An FBI agent named Robert Hanssen sold secrets to the Soviets and Russia for 22 years, and when caught said, "what took you so long?"
28. In 2013, after receiving a warning from the FBI on his PC, Jay Matthew Riley turned himself into police for possessing child pornography. The warning was fake and generated by a worm that had infected his computer.
29. A wanted pimp named Dante Dears had such a sophisticated pattern lock on his android phone that the FBI was unable to crack it. They had to serve Google with a warrant to try and help them.
30. A former FBI agent named John P. O'Neill was obsessed with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and warned of the threat of an attack on US soil. He took a job at the World Trade Center in the summer of 2001 and died on September 11th.
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15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
31Citizens' Commission
In 1971, a small group calling themselves the Citizens' Commission to investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office in Philly, stole over 1000 documents, exposed the extreme surveillance program COINTELPRO, and then sent these documents to the press, leading to the FBI shutting it down.
32. The FBI used mail delivery robots (Marvin) in their field offices that navigated the buildings by using cells of black lights to follow an invisible fluorescent paint sprayed onto the carpet to designate its route.
33. A set of notes, written in an unknown cipher, was found in the pocket of a dead man (Ricky McCormick) in 1999 and the FBI and leading cryptographers have been completely unable to crack the code.
34. The inventor of Tickle Me Elmo (Mark Johnson-Williams) was suspected by the FBI of being the Unabomber.
35. Mob boss John Gotti would offer coffee to the FBI agents assigned to tail him.
36Roving bug
In 2006, the FBI convicted a crime family using evidence collected by remotely enabling the microphone on a cell phone. This is called a "roving bug."
