Reno Man Accused of Stealing Legos

ABC News: Reno Man Accused of Stealing Legos: "PORTLAND, Ore. Nov 25, 2005 — A 40-year-old man is behind bars, accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars of a toy geared toward the 6-and-up crowd: Legos.

To haul away the evidence, agents working for the U.S. Postal Inspector said they had to back a 20-foot truck to William Swanberg's house in Reno, Nev., carting away mountains of the multicolored bricks.

Swanberg was indicted Wednesday by a grand jury in Hillsboro, a Portland suburb, which charged him with stealing Legos from Target stores in Oregon. Target estimates Swanberg stole and resold on the Internet up to $200,000 of the brick sets pilfered from their stores in Oregon as well as Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California.

When no one was looking, Swanberg switched 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 on Nov. 17, after he bought 10 boxes of the Star Wars Millennium Falcon set.

In his parked car, detectives found 56 of the Star Wars set, 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.

Attempts to reach Swanberg at the Washington County jail, where he is being held on $250,000 bail, were unsuccessful. It's unknown at this time if he has retained an attorney.

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

Today, according to the company's Web site, children across the world spend 5 billion hours every year playing with Lego bricks, available in 90 different colors. The bricks have long transcended its initial purpose as just a toy and like Crayola Crayons or Barbie has now become a cultural symbol. There are Web sites for Lego collectors and on eBay, rare Lego sets can sometimes fetch thousands of dollars."

You don't hear about stuff like this every day.

Image found: Here