Stealing Legos for fun and profit? 139
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."
RFID.... (Score:4, Insightful)
He sells them?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:RFID.... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Actually RFID in legos could be helpful (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
"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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that one Grammar Ninja or multiple Grammar Ninja?
Eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why the Insightful? (Score:3, 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 (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't a case for RFID. This is a case for making Lego less expensive.