Tip For Wannabe Thelmas And Louises: Don’t Waste Your Time Googling "Tracking Device"

Brittney Sykes and Emma Westhusing had been talking about robbing a bank for about a month when the duo allegedly pulled a heist Monday at an Oregon credit union.

The weapon-free robbery netted them $1370--for 20 minutes, at least.

The novice criminals--Sykes, 23, handed the teller a note, while Westhusing, 19, drove the getaway car--were almost immediately undone by a tracking device that the teller placed among the 48 bills she forked over. An amusing U.S. District Court affidavit describes what happened when the duo found the suspicious device when they returned to Sykes’s house to count the loot.

Sykes (pictured above left) told investigators that she “went to a computer and searched the Internet to figure out what the device might be.” Panicking and assuming that the pair would be busted, Sykes “ran out to her car and hid the device.” It is unclear why she did not try to dispose of it somewhere besides underneath the driver’s side floor mat in her purple Hyundai Accent.

For her part, Westhusing said that when the tracking device was discovered, Sykes thought it was a dye bomb, “so she threw it against the wall.” Her cohort, she added, “then stomped on it, and then looked up what it was on the Internet.”

While the pair was busy Googling (“bank robbery tracking device,” presumably), Oregon cops were following a GPS signal to Sykes’s Portland residence. The women were arrested on a federal bank robbery charge.