Due to constant abuse from this IP range, all interactive traffic is blocked. If you are running a legitimate crawler/robot, ensure that it properly identifies itself via the user agent with a contact site or address.Gloria Haas stole enough Legos last week to build her own plastic prison cell, according to authorities in Nassau County, New York. The 53-year-old was arraigned Friday on grand larceny charges after she allegedly snatched 800 sets of the iconic toys from a collector in Long Island and tried to unload the haul—valued at $59,000—on eBay. Less than 48 hours later, police toppled an even bigger Lego crime ring in Phoenix, Arizona, arresting four people in connection with at least $40,000 worth of Legos stolen from several Toys “R” Us stores. They also discovered $200,000 in Lego merchandise—18 pallets’ worth—in one of the suspects’ homes and a storage facility. While Legos aren’t exactly uncut diamonds (they’re not nearly as portable), as far as untraceable commodities go, they’re almost as good.
Thieves can sell unopened Lego sets, which are very difficult to track, almost immediately online for as much or more than the retail price. And if they sit on them for a while, it gets even better, because many of the bigger sets rapidly appreciate in value—at a rate much faster than inflation. In other words, they’re money in the bank. Last week’s back-to-back busts underscore what appears to be a growing awareness among criminals of Legos’ street value. Over the last couple of years, professional thieves and opportunists around the world have turned the Danish building blocks into fat stacks of Benjamins. They’ve included Silicon Valley executives, criminal masterminds in Florida, Oklahoma conmen and even drug dealers in Amsterdam, who have started accepting Lego toys as payment. Some go for the toy stores, others rob the delivery trucks. Earlier this year, a suspected band of crooks in Australia brandished angle grinders and crowbars to pilfer at least $30,000 in Legos from four different retailers.
In England, bandits in Watford Gap and West Yorkshire pulled off Lego truck heists to the tune of $87,000 and $67,000. In recent years, many criminals have devised increasingly sophisticated schemes to get their hands on the sweet plastic bricks. It took Phoenix police four and a half months of investigating before they could finally arrest Garry Fairbee, 35, Tarah Dailey, 33, and Melissa Dailey, 34. The crew was quietly stealing the most valuable sets and selling them at a discounted price to Troy Koehler, 40, a realtor by profession, who would then peddle the goods online. Others prefer to work alone and spread the crimes across several states to avoid detection. William Swanberg made in 2005 after he allegedly boosted more than $200,000 in Lego bricks from Target stores across Oregon, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California. The Reno, Nevada, man had meticulously mapped stores he planned to hit with special software. He would then switch bar codes on Lego boxes, swapping an expensive label with a cheaper one, according to police.
In almost every case, the ill-gotten goods are eventually sold over eBay and other online marketplaces, where Lego lovers are willing to plunk down hundreds of dollars for Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Legends of Chima sets, whose retail prices alone can run as high as $500. EBay currently lists more than 107,000 Lego sets, including a collector’s edition of the Star Wars Millennium Falcon for $3,350 and an unopened Eiffel Tower set for $3,300. BrickLink, a marketplace that deals exclusively in Lego products, lists more than 11,000 sets and nearly 35,000 parts for sale. Online vendors say the persistent demand for Lego sets, their tendency to appreciate in value over time and their difficulty to trace over the Internet make the plastic toys irresistible to thieves. “It makes total sense why people would steal Lego,” says Nathan Francis, who grosses between $3,000 and $4,000 a year legally selling sets on BrickLink in his spare time. “Lego sets can and do fetch a pretty penny.
In fact, the value of some coveted sets can skyrocket in a matter of years. For example, Francis says, the Lego 3450 Statue of Liberty sold for just $200 when it hit the market back in 2000. Lady Liberty, if unopened, now sells for as much as $10,000 on Amazon. “Lego holds its value very well on the secondary markets,” Francis says. Just ask Thomas Lagenbach. Investigators found hundreds of stolen Lego sets in 2012 inside the Silicon Valley tech executive’s multimillion dollar home. Lagenbach later pleaded no contest to fabricating his own bar codes at home, which he would then place on pricey Lego sets at Target to buy them at a cheaper price. The former vice president of SAP, a German software company, sold more than $30,000 in Lego sets on eBay under the name “tomsbrickyard,” authorities said. “This particular crime, the way it was done, the sophistication, the amount of expenditure in time and money to do it, suggests there’s something way beyond money that motivated him to do it,” said Cindy Seely Hendrickson, a deputy district attorney for Santa Clara County.
Perhaps it was just the thrill of the game. To his credit, Lagenbach’s eBay ratings were 99.9 percent positive. for joining the Redbubble mailing list Thanks for signing up! Receive exclusive deals and awesome artist news and content right to your inbox. Free for your convenience.We’ve got the biggest LEGO Technic set in the world here this week and we’re about to get in deep with how much we dig it. This is the LEGO Bucket Wheel Excavator, a “Technic” brand set that utilizes mainly Technic pieces, but a small set of standard LEGO bricks as well. This set is more than just a Technic set – it’s not just a model. It’s not the sort of thing an adult builds and lets sit on a shelf, as some LEGO Technic sets are prone to do. Instead, this set, be it on purpose or by complete coincidence, works with LEGO Minifigures. As we were very, very big fans of the LEGO Movie (see our original LEGO Movie Review), we’ve got a lot of Emmets on-hand. More Emmets than we do regular construction workers, as it were – and so this photo session came into being.
NOTE: LEGO makes no claim that this set is able to work with Minifigures (Emmet or otherwise), it’s just us here at SlashGear that’ve decided it should be so. The set is built completely according to the instructions included with the set (minus the extra dump-truck, which we’ve not photographed here), and Emmet looks like he’s right at home in nearly every location a person might stand on a machine such as this. Emmet fits in the Bucket Wheel Excavator’s driver’s seat – not perfectly (unless we wanted to mod it), but close enough. Emmet runs along the Bucket Wheel Excavator’s access decks. Emmet hangs from the ladders – which are, of course, standard Minifigure size. Emmet sits in a shovel! SEE ALSO: MetalBeard’s Sea Cow LEGO Review. FUN FACT: This is currently the largest LEGO Technic set in the history of LEGO. This Bucket Wheel Excavator has a LEGO motor and battery box that, with the help of a large number of gears and bars and three switches, makes for an interesting set of abilities.
The battery box and the motor sit right next to one another at the tail end of the crane – the end opposite the shovel wheel. There, 6x AA batteries later, the builder is able to control the excavator. Actions are controlled by three switches at the top of the tail end of the crane, just to the side of the battery box and motor. We are able to activate several functions here. The shovel wheel can be turned on and off on its own. The other two functions require that the shovel wheel switch be activated. As such, if the builder wishes to activate the treads so that the bucket loader moves forward or backward, they’ll also need the shovel wheel moving at the same time. The same is true of the entire top portion of the crane moving left or right – that requires that the switch be flipped for the shovel wheel, too. STEP 1: Shovels dig up bricks. STEP 2: Shovels drop bricks down slide to first conveyer belt. STEP 3: Conveyer belt moves bricks up crane arm.
STEP 4: First Conveyer belt transfers bricks to Second Conveyer belt. STEP 5: Second Conveyer belt drops bricks off in any direction, 180 degrees. around the back and to the sides of the vehicle. As the shovel digs up LEGO brick “rocks” (standard bricks, included with the set), they’re dropped on to one conveyer belt, up the arm of the crane, and down to a second conveyer belt. This second conveyer belt drops the rocks out the back or to the side of the vehicle. The digging bit is a bit complicated – it doesn’t just pick up masses of bricks with ease. Instead, it’s a situation where the builder has to push pieces near/into the shovels as they rotate. That is, unless they happen to have a very deep pile of bricks that’s forever filling in the area where the shovels pull bricks up. Note too that the builder will need to dig only bricks within the size ratio given in the bag-o-LEGO-rocks in the set (unlike the digging bit of the video above). The correct bricks are “Round 2 x 2 Dome Tops” for the most part – large enough not to get caught in any cracks, small enough to go down the slide between chutes.
The second conveyer belt moves automatically, but the direction the chute is pointed is controlled manually. The builder can let it move freely, or they can flip a switch (much like the switches at the top of the rig) that’ll keep the chute in one place. ABOVE: The second chute (Emmet’s in the way if we’d want to move it). BELOW: The lock switch to keep the second chute in place. Also in the mix are a variety of little bits that can move – ladders, for example. The top of the driver’s seat console moves as well, so that we can drop our favorite version of Emmet in as we wish. The crane arm can be lifted and lowered precisely by a set of Technic Linear Actuator pieces included with the set. These arms are not common pieces, by any means. They’re LEGO brick plastic on the outside and metal on the inside, and with the setup the instructions provide, the builder will be turning a tiny wheel connected to these actuators to move the entire crane arm up and down.
This is just about the only part of the whole build that I believe could be improved upon by an intrepid builder. Employing another battery pack and motor somewhere in the build (good luck) could potentially allow this arm to raise and lower with a switch – but we leave that to them. ABOVE: Front bumper with specifications tag for this unique vehicle. This set is 22.8 x 18.81 x 6.61 inches in the box (that’s the box’s dimensions) and weighs in at 13.16 pounds. The Bucket Wheel Excavator on its own is 16-in (41cm) high, 28-in (72cm) long and 11-in (29cm) wide. For transport from room to room, this model can be picked up by the handy handle at its top. Easy as can be. As you’ll see in our original write-up, this model can also produce a dump-truck in addition to the excavator. The excavator can also be taken apart and reconstructed into a Mobile Aggregate Processing Plant. Or a very interested builder could buy TWO sets and put both machines together to work in concert.