Asshat Lego thief

[Deathstalker]

Link

Man accused in $200,000 Lego Internet scam
Toy caper involved Target stores in 5 states

Friday, November 25, 2005; Posted: 8:57 a.m. EST (13:57 GMT)



PORTLAND, Oregon (AP) -- Agents had to use a 20-foot truck to cart away the evidence from a suspect's house -- mountains of Lego bricks.

William Swanberg, 40, of Reno, Nevada, is accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of the colorful plastic building blocks.

Swanberg was indicted by a grand jury in Hillsboro, a Portland suburb, which charged him with stealing Lego sets from Target stores.

Target estimates Swanberg stole up to $200,000 worth of the brick sets pilfered from their stores in Oregon, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California. The Legos were resold on the Internet, officials said.

Attempts to reach Swanberg at a county jail, where he was being held on $250,000 bail, were unsuccessful. It was not known if he had retained an attorney.

Swanberg is accused of switching the bar codes on Lego boxes, replacing an expensive one with a cheaper label, said Detective Troy Dolyniuk, a member of the Washington County fraud and identity theft enforcement team.

Target officials contacted police after noticing the same pattern at their stores in the five western states. A Target security guard stopped Swanberg at a Portland-area store November 17, after he bought 10 boxes of the Star Wars Millennium Falcon set.

In his parked car, detectives found 56 of the Star Wars sets, valued at $99 each, as well as 27 other Lego sets. In a laptop found inside Swanberg's car, investigators also found the addresses of numerous Target stores in the Portland area, their locations carefully plotted on a mapping software.

Records of the Lego collector's Web site, Bricklink.Com, show that Swanberg has sold nearly $600,000 worth of Legos since 2002, said Dolyniuk.

Lego's Danish founder Ole Kirk Christiansen named the famous bricks in 1934 by fusing two Danish words, "leg" and "godt" meaning "play well."

Children across the world spend 5 billion hours every year playing with Lego bricks, available in 90 different colors, according to the company's Web site.
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He was fired as an Admin of Bricklink the day this story came out.

[Darth Yoshi]

90 colors? Wow.

[felineki]

90 colors? Wow.

Yeah, there's loads of colors... some more common than others, of course. Recently (as of 2004) Lego actually made the controversial decision of permanently "replacing" some of the colors that have been around since the very begining... most notably both light and dark grays (whose new incarnations are noticeably more bluish than the originals). Kinda sucks in terms of backwards compatibility.

[Metrion Cascade]

90 colors? Wow.

Yeah, there's loads of colors... some more common than others, of course. Recently (as of 2004) Lego actually made the controversial decision of permanently "replacing" some of the colors that have been around since the very begining... most notably both light and dark grays (whose new incarnations are noticeably more bluish than the originals). Kinda sucks in terms of backwards compatibility.

::nods:: That shit drives me crazy - the old dark gray is my favorite hull color for spaceship models.

[bilateralrope]

90 colors? Wow.

Yeah, there's loads of colors... some more common than others, of course. Recently (as of 2004) Lego actually made the controversial decision of permanently "replacing" some of the colors that have been around since the very begining... most notably both light and dark grays (whose new incarnations are noticeably more bluish than the originals). Kinda sucks in terms of backwards compatibility.

Lego wasn't that good at backwards compatibility anyway, as most colors faded. Still, the greys probably held their color better anyway

[weemadando]

No punishment is strong enough for this kind of thievery.

LEGO must be placed above all other concerns.

[The Spartan]

No punishment is strong enough for this kind of thievery.

LEGO must be placed above all other concerns.

Can't. Stop. Laughing.

The second I read this all I could think about was someone being walled up behind a colorful wall, brick by brick. Sort of "Cask of Amontillado" style.

Just with colorful, plastic blocks instead of ceramic bricks and mortar.

[The Yosemite Bear]

yes for the love of lego montressor....