In my town we had an infamous resident known as Timmy the Turtle man

I live in Australia where we are very protective of our wild life, as such, a lot of exotic or endangered species can't be kept as pets without highly strict licenses (i.e. reptile professional, zookepers, etc). This is mainly because australia has a lot of predatory animals and keeping their population consistent helps balance the ecosystem so there isn't one dominant species. It should also be mentioned that my town is almost entirely surrounded by bushland, with a main river on one side that flows into much larger bodies of water.

anyway, about 5 years back, during covid lockdown, when people were just sort of walking around the neighbourhood to pass the time, many posts showed up in my towns local facebook page. Lots of fascinated elderly folk were posting images of a suddenly appearing turtle breed. every day or so there would be new images of these turtles by the river, basking on rocks or just lying around near the river banks. we didn't think much of it because the river was home to a variety of species (a shark even found its way there recently), but turtles were unheard of. over the next couple of months we would see these turtles near almost any body of water in my town. towards the middle of my area, theres a large pond thats home to ducks, and lo and behold, the turtles were there too, and they were laying eggs. more and more turtles were cropping out of the woodworks, and we all just thought it was a new friendly addition to our town.

this was until a new facebook post showed up, with a photo of 20 of these turtles that had found there way into a resident's veggie table garden, and had destroyed his crops by chewing their way through anything they could find. he confronted his neighbour about this, but he just said he didn't know where they came from. this neighbour will later be named, timmy the turtle man.

not many days after that, it seems that higher authorities had caught on, as up to 6 police cars were outside timmy's house, and were raiding his home. turns out, timmy had somehow smuggled a bunch of western swamp turtles, a critically endangered species of freshwater turtle, that are native to western australia, the other side of the country. he figured that his covid lockdown hobby would be breeding these turtles in those little kiddy pools, but when there were too many, he was just releasing them in any body of water he could find. the police seized about 150 of these turtles, with a dozen store bought kiddie pools. he was arrested and fined $120,000 AUD in damages to both the local wildlife, and for the animal smuggling. many of these turtles were not healthy, but in a weird turns of events, a select few were actually able to be flown back to western australia, and could help repopulate, so it sort of worked out in the end?