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Man accused of stealing vast number of Lego kits from Target stores

Mark Frauenfelder at 4:28 pm Fri, Nov 25, 2005

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A 40-year-old Reno man has been arrested for stealing lots and lots of Lego bricks from Target. Authorities say his M.O. is to paste a cheaper bar code over more expensive kits and then resell them. It appears as if he's been doing this for a number of years.
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.

Link (thanks, Shawn!)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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