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One of my personal joys of visiting a mountain town is asking locals to tell me the latest and greatest tale of bear crime.

During a recent trip to Glenwood Springs, Colorado, a guy told me about a mischievous black bear that snuck into a parked Subaru to steal a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. Alas, the car was parked on slanted driveway, so the door slammed shut after the critter lumbered inside. The stunned bear proceeded to take a massive poop on the driver’s seat before shredding the interior and shattering a window. As an armchair legal scholar, my guess is that constitutes burglary, property damage, and perhaps public indecency.

Not to be outdone, another person told me of a bear that opened the sliding glass door to a condominium and proceeded to raid the refrigerator. The condo owner was getting ready for a barbecue, and the bear ate all of his steaks, baked beans, and potato salad before slipping into the woods. That’s probably home invasion and grand larceny.

Bears poach hot tubs, vandalize yard decor, and steal too many crash cans to count. In mountain towns, they are blue-collar criminals that pursue misdemeanors whenever the opportunity presents itself.

So even I was astonished to read about a bear in California that stands accused of a white-collar felony. Yep, I’m talking about Insurance-Fraud Bear.

By now you’ve likely read a headline or seen a pithy video on social media about this whimsical bear story. Last week, the California Department of Insurance published a glorious press release about four residents of Lake Arrowhead who in January claimed that a bear had broken into their Rolls Royce and caused a ton of damage. Seeking a payout, they submitted a hefty claim to their insurance company alongside surveillance video of the alleged bear break-in.

The video, which was included in the release, is laugh-out-loud hilarious, and I suggest that everyone reading this post watch it on a loop. The “bear” fumbles around in the passenger’s seat like a seven-beers-deep frat boy, and the bear’s fuzzy “skin” droops on its arms and legs like a size XXL sweatsuit would on your teenaged nephew. After about ten seconds it’s obvious that the car invader is not a bear, but rather a human in a bear suit. I’ve seen Kindergarteners do better animal impersonations.

Another red flag: the damage done by the supposed bear amounted to some light scratching to the interior. To me, these scrapes look like they were done with a hairbrush and not sharp two-inch-long claws.

The cops got a search warrant and paid a visit to the four, and of course they called the mission “Operation Bear Claw.” Lo and behold, they found a Spirit Halloween-grade bear costume in the residence. The four individuals were arrested and face charges of insurance fraud. As it turns out, this was not the first bear-centric scheme that they had allegedly pulled off. According to the release, the four had filed two previous auto insurance claims for bear break-ins, with the total amount claimed hitting $141,839,

Press releases published by government agencies have a way of describing thrilling or terrifying or even hilarious scenes with the most anodyne prose, and the statement published by the California Department of Insurance follows this tone in describing the “aha” moment to a tee.

“To further ensure it was not actually a bear in the video, the Department had a biologist from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife review the three alleged bear videos and they also opined it was clearly a human in a bear suit,” it reads. Oh, what I would give to have attended that viewing party.

The saga of Insurance-Fraud Bear made the rounds in national media for obvious reasons (it’s bizarre and funny). Shout out to our friends at TMZ who did the most insightful original reporting. They had a stuntman named Glenn Ennis, who performed the motion-capture motions of the grizzly in The Revenant, watch the surveillance tape and critique the acting. “They were obviously lazy,” Ennis said. “If they put a little bit of thought and research into it like I did, they’d see that bears don’t walk on their hands and knees, they walk on their feet—that was a dead giveaway.”

I’d argue that the ill-fitting bear suit was the dead giveaway, but hey, we’re splitting fur at this point.

The busy news cycle will quickly move on from Insurance-Fraud Bear, and soon this whole ordeal will fade from our collective memory, much like the many silly bear stories of yesteryear. But I for one will always remember Insurance Fraud Bear, as it has forever changed my perspective on mountain-town bear crime.

The next time I hear a tale of a brazen bear raiding someone’s pantry, or taking a dip in a condo swimming pool, or munching down some tasty trash, I will now wonder: Did a bear really do it?