Incredibly wealthy Silicon Valley exec arrested for complicated high-tech Lego theft at Target
Words defy me. Now please speculate on why a multi-millionaire would hatch this ridiculous scheme of planting fake barcodes so he could steal a measly 30 grand worth of Lego sets from Target.
Seriously, WTF.
Actually I think I figured it out: for him, Lego sets are his Rosebud, symbolic of the childhood he never had.
“And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for you meddling adults!”
So he sells his childhood, over and over, on Ebay, to make a few dishonest dollars? 
Man has issues.
Kleptomaniacs almost never need the stuff; I’d guess this is similar.
It’s his way of getting a ‘thrill.’
Boy, I’d like to do a barcode swap against all of Walmart. Not actually buy the products, but swap barcodes so that their inventory goes ka-fluey. My guess… at some point, he paid the $90 for the toys (wow, that’s an insane price for Legos!) and deeply resented it, so decided to pull a Robin Hood on them.
A $2 million dollar home sounds expensive, but probably not in the area where he lives. Google tried to hire me for that area once. I told them I’d never be able to afford living there. They insisted that the pay would be much more than adequate. I still refused the job because of the relo. Where I live now, I can maintain my mortgage on a reasonable pay, but in that area? With a $4k/mo mortgage? I’d be a wage slave of the worst kind.
The Associated Press story says that his house was filled with hundreds of Lego sets he had assembled. Don’t junkies sometimes sell a portion of the drugs they acquire?
I’m thinking “mortgage”
From this one, I note that he swapped several barcodes when they caught him, but only bought one. Kind of like Enkel’s post.
He lives in San Carlos. $2m is a fancy home there, but it probably isn’t a mansion. Median home price is apparently $867,000, down from $1,070,000 before 2008. Zillow link, warning slow as molasses. A 2 million dollar home could easily be the price he bought it for a couple of years ago.
I’m thinking kleptomania. It’s not about the money. I wouldn’t give him a pass, although I do like that he chose such a nerdy thing to steal, instead of designer clothes or something.
SAP accountants might do well to recheck the books and verify that his less-than-legal activities were strictly extracurricular in nature.
Not to derail my own thread, but that reminds me - surely retailers are wise to the fact that these days any old schmuck with a PC and a printer can read and print barcodes. So why don’t they put in security mechanisms to prevent this kind of thing? For example, the data in the barcode could be encrypted, with the encryption key residing on the cashier’s computers. Or the code could omit any price information and just contain the SKU etc., which checks it against a database when the item is scanned, and the price is supplied from there. I’m sure there are many other ways it could be defeated as well.
I expect that he got to be a multimillionaire in the first place by being obsessively greedy and willing to cut corners and break the law whenever he thought he could get away with it, and this is just the time when he’s been caught and couldn’t sweep it under the rug.
I’ve assumed that the barcodes only contain the SKU, and the stores computers pull up a cost to go with that. Otherwise how would barcodes that are printed on the packaging by the manufacturer work?
I’m guessing that what he did was overlay a different barcode over the pre-printed one. So that instead of scanning as a $150 Lego Deathstar, the scanner sees a $75 smaller Starwars Lego kit. Unless the cashier knows that Deathstar sets don’t sell for $75, they would see “Big Lego Set” and not catch the difference.
Yup. Depending on when he bought it, a 2mil house in San Carlos could be a nice 4-bedroom, 3-bath and 2 car garage house in an ordinary subdivision. The housing market in the SF bay area is insane.
Ah, see I thought about that but had more extreme examples in mind. Like if you went to buy a digital camera and it rang up as a $0.99 pack of Skittles, someone might notice something is amiss.
Well, to be fair the article’s headline called him “incredibly wealthy”. I don’t know if they had any other data besides the price of his house, or if they were just being sensationalist.
The retailer wouldn’t bear the cost of this. The manufacturers would. I know Walmart has been trying to push RFIDs on manufacturers, but so far they’ve resisted.
From a risk management perspective, they are far better off focusing on the theft discovery devices (that make something beep when you try to go through the doors) because shoplifting is far, far, far more common than this approach.
What is kind of cool is that this guy would not have gotten caught if he had paid cash and used a much wider area to work in.
The thing that is interesting is that this is in the news. I’m sure Target is **really **hoping this **dies out very quickly **before groups of people start “barcode bouncing” as a way of ‘getting back at the 1%’.
Imagine if anonymous decided to start randomly messing with bar codes on a major scale of just one retailer. That could force retailers into an RFID situation (that could just as easily be defeated), that would mean updating all their POS systems, forcing manufacturers to eat even more costs than they already do. If a single retailer were continually targeted, it could actually affect their stock prices.
People steal for sums that should be trivial to them. Look at Martha Stewart. She had a net worth in 2001 of $800,000,000. That insider trading deal that got her sent to prison? She made $45,673 on that.
You know, this is another tangent but that reminds me of an interview with one of Google’s execs that I saw where they talked about the extravagant benefits Google offers to its employees (the massages, exquisite catering, fun and games, limo shuttles, etc. etc.). He explained the reasoning behind it is that they want their employees to be working all the time. Essentially, never leaving work. When you think of it that way, it doesn’t sound as appealing (at least to me). Even the most gilded cage is still a cage, right?
My new theory… he was in an adjustable mortgage, so knew a foreclosure was down the road. He was aquiring legos to build his new ‘off-grid’ house (out in a park somewhere) so that he could jingle mail the mortgage that was SO underwater that even scuba gear couldn’t help it. Then, he’d write a book about his experience, publish it on Kindle, and become a real millionaire and buy back the house at 1/4 what he originally paid for it.
Hmmm… I think I’m going to go price bar code printers this weekend.