I saw this story on BBC Breakfast this morning. For those that haven’t encountered it, Geocaching involves a kind of treasure hunt, coordinated via the Internet and GPS.

In this case, the cache maintainer had (unwisely, I would say) decided to place a labelled box under a planter in a town centre. When a cacher was spotted replacing the box, it got reported as a suspect package, and much mayhem involving the bomb squad ensued.

Personally, I wouldn’t be placing real caches in that situation- in fact, I maintain 2 virtual caches in central Birmingham- and the reason they are virtual is that they’re right in the centre near brindleyplace and the Bull Ring- but it has to be said that geocaching.com (the largest cache listing site) didn’t exactly help the situation by preventing the creation of new virtual caches a while ago.