I guess that's one way to ensure the house is empty.

how awful...

dee beat me to it. Don't go!

Makes me wonder if the thieves knew the homeowners. How would they know what concert the couple would actually go see? My first thought would be that the tickets were fakes.
Too bad the crooks didn't use their powers of thought for good.

Really that was in your paper? Was it a true story or a warning of what could happen? Because stories like that have been going around for years, as Snopes explains.

Here is a link that might be useful: Snopes

Well that's a new one! Strange, but clever. I hope they caught the perpetraters.

If the story isn't a hoax, I think a new low in intelligence (the homeowners) has been achieved and documented.

don't know if that story is true, but this one is:

One of my friends, who was watching her neighbors' house while the neighbors went to a family funeral in another city, decided to mow their front lawn.

They all live on a dead-end street at the end of a country road, so there's virtually no traffic.

As she was mowing, a van turned onto the street & stopped.

After a moment, the van backed out & drove off.

It could have been happenstance, just some poor lost person out in the country, but people do watch the obituaries & look up the addresses of survivors & the dates & times of funerals.

Then they know exactly when the house will be unoccupied for a number of hours.