Darn... My travel adventures read like a Mark Twain novel... But I've only busted one other such scam in my recent memory. Sadly, no Gypsies involved.... But here goes:
While growing up in the rural south, our mailbox was literally 1 whole mile away from our house, on a dirt road within sight of nothing at all but trees in every direction.
Local rednecks with pickup trucks and baseball bats simply loved to play mailbox baseball at our place. It was like the town sport or something... In a time well before security cameras were affordable or even possible, so far from any power outlets.
So after about our 5th mailbox replacement, we started getting creative.
The first thing we tried was telling our mailman to just hold onto our mail for a bit and avoid the mailbox while we filled it full or purple Dye, so that when thumped, the dye would shoot forward out of the door and all over the truck and redneck in question.
It may have worked, but we don't know either way because the rednecks were simply very good at cleaning their truck off... And were back to get the next mailbox in under a week. :/
Next we tried filling it with stink bombs (the little glass vials that break easily) but those just made our mailbox area stink for a week as far as I knew.
Then it was nails embedded in the road very close to the mailbox, so their tires would pop when they got within swinging range. -Sadly the sheriff found the nails before the rednecks did. I think dad got a stern talking to for that.
We dreamed of ways to electrocute them, take pictures of them, and drop heavy things on them, but nothing worked because this was simply an old country dirt road with no nearby trees or structures to mount anything on. It seemed impossible.
Finally one 4th of july I came up with a winner.
Do you remember those stupid "Snap n Pop" things that kids throw on the ground and they actually go "pop" from gunpowder explosion, but very small? Well I took it on myself to scale the hell up out of one of those.
I bought about 150 boxes of snap n pops, and a bottle of actual gunpowder. (Ok my dad bought that part, I was 12.) To direct the blast forward we tripled the metal on the back wall of our next mailbox, and filled it completely to the stuffed-shut door with gunpowder mixed all inbetween them. I even cut off their little twisty tails to make them cram in closer and more likely to explode. Then we hot-glued the lid shut... Dad stopped me just short of placing some BBs in the front to make it a giant shotgun shell... I'm glad he did that!
Naturally, we told the mailman again to steer clear of it. By this point he had started an office betting pool or something like that with the other mailmen about which date we'd finally get these bastards...
After a good week passed, one night while watching McGyver on TV I heard the "whu-boom" of an explosion. Damn, I loved McGyver but I just had to run out and see if we'd killed anyone.
The rednecks were gone but the explosion had been HUGE. You could see the charred outline of the rear of their pickup synged into the ground! Luckily nothing had caught fire, and there were no body parts at the scene.
A week later, the (other) mailman who won the pool bet caught up with us and told us that he's seen the charred truck on his mailing route. Ahh, sweet revenge!
The driver was a 20-year old punk who lived in the next school district over and the whole town knew what he'd done, and especially were able to figure out why his best friend had no hair on his face or arms at all for the rest of the month... I don't think the truck ever fully recovered either.
Sadly, even this didn't stop things, so dad hired a mason to completely cover the mailbox in bricks and mortar. That worked for at least a year before we sold the farm there, but I've driven past it since and it is a pile of rubble today.
Fucking Redneck monkeys.
