Random Places That Are Surprisingly Easy to Sneak Into (16 items)

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  (#1) The United States

  America is a big country and big places aren't usually that difficult to sneak into. There are a wealth of options for sneaking into the US, whether it be sneaking across one of our borders with Canada or Mexico or just hopping on a plane and never returning to your home country. Determination goes a long way.
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  (#2) Buckingham Palace

  • Neoclassicism

  Back in 1982, Queen Elizabeth awoke from a nap to find what appeared to be a drunken homeless man standing by her bedside, dripping blood on the carpet. The fellow's name was Michael Fagan, and he had (for the second time that week) climbed a drainpipe and entered the Palace through an unlocked window. The blood was from an ashtray he'd cut himself on while stealing a $6 bottle of wine from the Queen's stash. Afterward, he meandered into her bedroom and chatted with her for about 10 minutes until a maid found them. Fagan wasn't charged with any crime aside from stealing a bottle of wine, since it had never occurred to anyone to make breaking into Buckingham Palace illegal.
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  (#3) Red Square (During the Cold War)

  In 1987, a daring young lad from West Germany had a brilliantly suicidal idea: to end the Cold War by flying his tiny Cessna airplane into Russian airspace, landing right in the middle of Red Square and giving the Russians and NATO something to talk about. And he did it.

  Despite flying right through the Iron Curtain, supposedly some of the most heavily defended airspace in the world, and fully expecting to be shot down by a squadron of MiGs, 19-year-old Mathias Rust piloted his small plane right to the Kremlin's front door and landed in Red Square like he owned it. People were fired. And by "fired," we mean "shot." Mathias did succeed in a way, too; at the very least, his infiltration proved that Russia was nowhere near the dominant military power it still played at being, and Gorbachev "tore down that wall" a short time later.  
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  (#4) The White House

  People have been breaking into the White House for ages; one of the most notable was a fellow named Charles Dickens, who broke in after President John Tyler took too long to answer the door.

  The Secret Service regularly has to deal with unwanted visitors, mostly in the form of tourists wandering about. There have been several cases of tourists splitting off from tour groups and wandering around the mansion. Granted, most uninvited guests don't make it past the lawn these days due to all the sophisticated electronic surveillance. But break-ins and attempted break-ins still happen on a pretty regular basis.

  In 2009, socialites Tareq and Michaele Salahi infiltrated a dinner party at the White House and got their pictures taken with President Obama and Vice President Biden before being found out.
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  (#5) Trains

  You know that old cliche about vagabonds "riding the rails" from town to town? It's not just a convention of Victorian times - it still  happens, and for a pretty good reason. Modern freight trains are often over a mile long and slow down or stop completely near populated areas. Enough so that hitchhikers have enough time to scout those areas and hop on the next train headed out of town. Granted, they might have to spend the entire trip outside on the steel tie between cars, but hey, it beats paying for gas!
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  (#6) 10 Downing Street (the Prime Minister's House)

  Say what you will about the Brits, but they do put a lot of faith in their people. So much so that in 2008, a burglar convicted of theft 78 times simply walked into the PM's house right through the front door. He arrived with his Lithuanian girlfriend, who quickly flashed her Lithuanian ID card to the guards. Assuming the couple to be poorly dressed foreign dignitaries, the guards let them in. The two walked from office to office, shoving stuff in their pockets. As you do. They were finally caught, but the couple isn't in prison, and the guards still have their jobs. So... cool?
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  (#7) Scottish Castles

  Castles are designed to be invasions-proof - that is kind of the point of them, right? Sure, we have all kinds of modern weapons that could level any sort of fortification now, but certainly a castle would be the ideal location to protect valuable works of art against guys with an axe. Yeah, you'd think. But in 2003, Drumlangrig Castle in Scotland was broken into by four gentlemen wielding weapons that dated back to earlier than the castle itself. They stole several precious works of art, including a da Vinci masterpiece entitled "Madonna of Yarnwinder." Valued at about $40 million, it was eventually recovered by the rightful owners.
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  (#8) SeaWorld

  If this one doesn't make you laugh, you're just dead inside. In 2012, three Aussies got sloshed to the gills (not uncommon) and decided to take a trip to Gold Coast SeaWorld. Only problem: it was closed. So they scaled a fence, broke in, and had a grand ol' time swimming with the dolphins.

  While none of them remember exactly how it happened, the trio woke up the next day to a fascinating new houseguest: Dirk the Penguin. That's right, three guys drunkenly kidnapped a penguin from SeaWorld. Hangover 4, anyone? (Dirk was returned to SeaWorld, and the gentlemen in question used the video above in court as proof that they did not intend to harm the traumatized bird.)
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  (#9) Celebrities' Houses

  Many celebrities have been the victims of robberies, some surprisingly recently. P. Diddy's house got broken into in 2012. Rachael Bilson had her entire shoe collection stolen and Kate Moss had three pieces of artwork stolen from her house while she was home. Paris Hilton got taken for $2 million in jewelry by a group known as "The Bling Ring," which regularly targeted celebrities. They also hit Lindsay Lohan and Megan Fox.
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  (#10) Nuclear Power Stations

  Nuclear terrorism is a horrifying idea - and it doesn't require a Russian warhead bought on the black market. Greenpeace protesters proved that twice, once in 2003 and once in 2010, when they broke into two separate nuclear power plants using nothing more than a pair of wire-cutters.

  On the first occasion, the tie-dye wearing Greenpeace terrorists made it all the way to the central control room of England's Sizewell B nuclear plant. They repeated the feat in Sweden a few years later, while wearing giant windmill costumes.
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  (#11) Zoos

  Zoos and animal preserves are surprisingly easy to break into, and it happens on a regular basis. Large areas, scant staff at night, and a lack of funding for security measures are contributing factors. So is poaching in Africa. But in one case in Boise, Idaho, two people broke into a zoo seemingly for the explicit purpose of killing a monkey.

  The two black-clad men escaped, and zoo staff found a dead patas monkey the next day. It had been killed by some kind of blunt-force trauma to the head. The exact motive for the break-in remains unknown; it's possible the men had something else planned, ran into the monkey by accident, and fled after killing it.
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  (#12) Bentley Dealerships

  This was less a "sneak-in" and more a "smash-and-grab." But in 2013, a pair of masked men broke the display window at a La Jolla, California Bentley dealership and proceeded to steal about $150,000 worth of luxury Breitling watches. One of the timepieces was worth $60,000 alone. Credit where credit is due, these guys did a better job than the last robbers who broke into that dealership. In 2003, a group broke in and took hostages; they were later caught and arrested. The Watch Bandits remain at large, and police remain on the lookout for a pair of black-clad men who are consistently prompt.
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  (#13) Prisons, ft. Snoopy and a Cat

  For a place designed to keep people in and modeled on the concept of a medieval fort, you'd think prisons would be pretty hard to break into. And certainly, most American supermax prisons are. Hey, with the largest prison population on Earth, we've got practice. England, though, seems to have a bit of a problem in this department.

  In one case, a man broke into a prison wearing a Snoopy costume, intending to snatch a prisoner and dance his way back out. Another Englishman broke into a prison to steal $13,000 in cigarettes from inmates. In Brazil, guards noticed a suspicious looking cat wandering around the grounds. Upon closer inspection, they realized the cat had been strapped with cell phones, files, knives, and other implements of malfeasance.
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  (#14) Celebrities' Cell Phones

  Wikipedia calls it the "iCloud leaks of celebrity photos." But if you don't know this event better as "The Fappening," you've never been on the Internet. In 2014, someone discovered a security loophole in Apple's iCloud storage network that would allow them to make unlimited guesses at passwords. Using brute-force password guessing software, hackers from 4chan quickly went about invading the private photos of celebrities. Most of them, as you've no doubt heard, were nude. Dozens of photos leaked, notably those of Jennifer Lawrence, Kat Dennings, Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst, and Kaley Cuoco.
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  (#15) The Pentagon's Mainframe

  You've seen this one so often in "hacker" movies it's almost become a trope. But it really has happened, and probably far more often than anyone would like to admit. The most high-profile case of Pentagon hacking came in 1983, back when computers were made of matchsticks and hamster wheels. Hacker Kevin Mitnick was arrested by the FBI for illegally accessing the Pentagon's computers that year, and not for the first or last time. He had previously, and has since, broken into the FBI itself. He now runs cyber security firm Mitnick Security.
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  (#16) Sun Microsystems, Google, McDonalds, Yahoo!, and Everywhere Else

  Adrian Lamo is a legendary hacker who's gotten into practically every secure network you can think of. His fame eventually reached far enough to warrant attention from NBC News, which asked him to demonstrate his talents on-air. Not wanting to disappoint his fans, Lamo spent the next five minutes hacking into the secure computer network of NBC itself. After that, he took control of the screen captions and replaced them all with "GOAT." All right, that didn't happen... but wouldn't you do it?

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