Stealing Legos for fun and profit?

Mad_Rain writes "Every nerd I know had (or still has) a fairly extensive Lego collection. But I don't think most would go so far as to steal $200,000 worth of Legos. When police arrived to carry away the evidence from his home, they needed a 20-foot-long truck. They found in the car of the accused a laptop computer that had a list of Target stores that he was planning to defraud along with the mapping software on how to get there."

Comments

RFID....

[Joe Random]

The guy didn't exactly steal the legos (or LEGO bricks, for the anal-retentative). He pulled the ol' UPC-swap trick on the store. What do you want to bet the retail market will use cases like this to try to push for RFID tagging of products? "If we only had RFID tags in all of the products we sell this never would have happened, and we would have saved our shareholders tons of money."

Re:RFID....

[E8086]

So RFID tags are not easy to change, but I don't think bar codes are going to be replaced as the primary thing to scan at the checkout counters for at least the next couple years. If you're going to try some swap the barcode scam make sure the store has an small appliance section with working floor model microwaves. Just to make it look more convincing give the box a couple kicks and small tears while you're walking around looking for the microwaves. That way if a store employee asks you can try something like "it was the last one on the shelf" and ask for an open-box/item discount and don't forget to pull the price tag off the shelf so you can act like you don't know how much it should cost and it will require even more effort for someone to find the real price.
As for the store employees noticing, have you been to a Target or Walmart recently? At least around here they seem to be staffed by highschool dropouts and people who don't speak english, ok, so you once in a while you might run into a college student with a crappy job who is paying attention. If the store employees cared enough and knew enough, these swap the bar code scams wouldn't be successful enough to have thousands in profit. And the stores arn't doing much to help.

The supermarket where I worked during HS replaced the one line abreviated display with 10" LCD monitors so the cashiers can see the full item name and price to make it harder for someone to successfully swap price tags. At least at the local Target and KMart they're still using the small one line displays with abreviations that most of the cashiers don't even understand and Lego's appear as "TOY - $29.99" even if it's the Millennium Falcon which retails anywhere from $49.99 to $99.99 and it's not going to get caught unless that cashier collects SW Legos and flags it.
If you were a part time cashier at Target, how likely would you be to call your manager over if you though a price was higher? If you're wrong, you've just wasted a customer's time and implied they were doing something dishonest. Any penalties might be lower if they were like that guy and buying ten at a time and you don't recall seeing the item on sale in the weekly flier.

He sells them?!

[Sloppy]

The story says he has sold $600k worth of legos. Damn, he's just a run-of-the-mill crook, in it merely for the profit. I was hoping the story would explain what kind of totally insane thing he wanted to build that needed $200k worth of legos. Like he was building a whole house or something. Drat.

Actually RFID in legos could be helpful

[SuperKendall]

Need that one elusive piece? Just whip out the home RFID reader and point at your cases! Now you know right where it is, and can even do quick binary searches on piles of legos.

I wonder how many RFID tags a reader can pick out? Does a mass of different ones swamp a reader? Kind of an interesting question all by itself.

bricklink.com NOT _his_ website

[Ezza]

The article falsely states:

"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"

Some people sell stolen goods on ebay, but ebay is not THEIR website.

Bricklink is a marketplace to buy/sell new/used lego kits, parts etc, but having an account on bricklink doesn't make it YOUR website.

Grr.

Re: LEGO

[narcc]

(shudder) You'd better watch out for the Grammar Ninja.

Is that one Grammar Ninja or multiple Grammar Ninja?

Eh?

[bnjf]

What's a Legos?

Re:Why the Insightful?

[ArsenneLupin]

This is intentional. Funny doesn't give karma, whereas Insightful does. So if you want to reward a really funny joke (debatable...), you give it an Insightful.

Or maybe the slashdot coders could again give karma for Funny mods... The number of jokes modded Insightful should tell them something...

Lego now so expensive it's worth stealing

[evilandi]

The missed point here is: Lego is now so expensive that it is worth stealing. When child's toy bricks get into the same crime bracket as alcohol and tobacco, something is wrong.

This isn't a case for RFID. This is a case for making Lego less expensive.