Police in France are sharing details about their investigation into a group of criminals who heisted boxes of Lego blocks from a toy shop in Yvelines, near Paris, in June 2020.
The suspects, who were all from Poland, would allegedly stay near Paris, drive around in an Audi, and steal Lego sets from stores to resell in Poland, according to investigators on the case.
“They come to France, set up in a hotel in the Paris region, then set about raiding toy stores before returning to Poland to sell off their haul,” an investigator said.
The alleged thieves, a woman and two men, were first reported in France in November 2019 and again in February 2020 before they were arrested in the process of stealing boxes of Legos from the Yvelines shop in June 2020.
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Connecting the crime to a broader black-market Lego toy trend, the officer told the French newspaper Le Parisien: “The Lego community isn’t just made up of children. … There are numerous adults who play with it; there are swaps and sales on the internet. We’ve also had people complaining their homes have been broken into and Lego stolen.”
Gerben van IJken, identified as a Lego specialist who advises an online auction platform on which people can buy and sell collectibles, told the Guardian that sales on a French collectible website doubled in 2020 because of the pandemic.
“People have more time at home because of the health restrictions, and the game market has exploded. We often have more than 1,000 Lego sales a week,” he said.
“There’s always been dealing in Lego because it’s a premium toy range and attracts many adults but also because the company withdraw [sic] its collections around two years after they come out, so a secondhand market is inevitable,” he continued. “The phenomenon has exploded over the last eight years because people have realized they can make money reselling Lego on the internet.”
The United States has its own history of illicit Lego commerce. In 2006, a man whom the Department of Justice referred to as the “Lego thief” was indicted after allegedly stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars of Lego merchandise from retail stores and selling it on the web.
A former vice president of a Palo Alto software firm got prison time in 2013 for pasting fraudulent bar codes on Lego toys at local Target stores.
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In 2017, the co-owner of Gary’s Steals and Deals in Portage, Pennsylvania, pleaded guilty to a money laundering scheme that involved the resale of stolen merchandise, including Lego sets.
