Truth stranger than fiction? Nope.It's the same damned thing.

A robber basically took a scam from Neil Gaiman's American Gods where a fake security guard set up a fake deposit strongbox and made off with thousands. Then he did it real life. And it worked.

Neil Gaiman's reaction: (Scroll down to Wednesday's blog)

And the strangest thing that happened today is that I got an e-mail from a Winnipeg reporter, wanting to interview me: currently, the Winnipeg police are reading American Gods, after a fake security guard with a fake night-deposit box got away with $40,000.

Of course, he could have got it from http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/guard.htm. Or he could have got it from Chuck Whitlock's Scam School, or one of the other books on scams it's mentioned in... but I suppose he may well have got the idea from me.

(Strange: I fogged the details of the credit card scam in American Gods because they were too easy to pull off, but I detailed that one because it seemed unlikely to the point of impossibility that anyone would read it in the novel and then try to pull it off.)

Not quite as weird as that 9-1-1 lottery thing, but pretty damned close.