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Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection

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Re: Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection

#271

Post by hedora »

xmprt wrote: post #8

One of the saddest things about modern capitalism is that people stealing from businesses is criminalized and heavily punished but businesses stealing from people (eg. wage theft, illegal contracts, medicare/PPP fraud, and outright stealing like this case) is treated as a civil violation and almost impossible to prosecute. The only cases of white collar crime I've seen get prosecuted is securities fraud and that's ri…

It's extremely rare for a rich / famous person to get prosecuted for securities fraud.

For instance, Martha Stewart (the only example that comes to mind) was convicted of lying and obstruction of justice, not for any actual crime that was being investigated.

It's not like she was the mastermind of the 2008 securities fraud meltdown, but she was the only person to go to jail for it.

Re: Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection

#272

Post by jasonfarnon »

rdtsc wrote: post #140

> Bricks & Minifigs CEO Ammon McNeff is a graduate of Brigham Young University. Joshua Johnson and Brandon Best are, by public record and documented account, members of the LDS community. When Reckless Ben's team, following the pattern of obstruction by local law enforcement, looked into the individual officers involved in these incidents, they found that multiple officers were also BYU alumni. I thought “it has to b…

Do you know all these involved parties aren't mormons in some mormon area/mormon company? Eg the old guy, the franchisee?

Re: Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection

#273

Post by HDThoreaun »

curiousgal wrote: post #46
throwaway85825 wrote: post #16

The part 2 video where the police harass and falsely arrest ben is even more shocking.

If this the same Ben in YouTube then omg was he annoying. I couldn't even get throught the first quarter of the video. The dude shows up at a store. They ask him to leave multiple times. They call on the police on him. Then he says "the police are in on it" because they trespassed him. Like wow shocking that the police won't get involved in a civil matter. Then they manipulate a store employee that had nothing to do…

> Just get a fucking lawyer.

First they tried and realized they couldnt afford one. Then they came up with a way to settle this in small claims, won, and the franchisor decided to close the store. The legal process did not work here

Re: Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection

#274

Post by jasonfarnon »

hedora wrote: post #258
crazygringo wrote: post #230

> Then Bricks & Minifigs Corporate took control of the Salem location from the original franchise owner > They were found liable in court. They closed the store rather than pay. This doesn't make any sense. If the corporation took control of the franchise, the corporation now owns it and its obligations. They can close the store if they want, but that doesn't do anything about their obligation to pay. What's missing…

If they were smart, they took the "inventory" as payment for some imaginary debt, bankrupting the store without taking ownership of it. Hopefully, the courts will see through that tactic, and add a contempt charge on top of all the civil penalties.

do we know the debt is "imaginary"? Was this inventory seized in satisfaction of some debt.

Re: Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection

#275

Post by usehand »

Aurornis wrote: post #266
usehand wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not defending the company at all. My comment was about the YouTuber who got involved as a 3rd party for content production. You have claimed the story is "just needless YouTube drama" and that you "wouldn't really trust the YouTube influencers for the whole story". Unless you are completely incapable of understanding basic human communication, this obviously amounts to defending the company.

[flagged]

> False. I said that a 3rd party traveling across the country to serve papers himself and then sitting in front of the house while police are called 4 times is needless YouTube drama.

Notice how you ignore the second quote? Anyone can literally search these comments see what you said.

I guess there's not much you can do to try to argue that you're not defending the company, when you're claiming the people exposing them are just creating "drama" and are not trustworthy, so you default to just pretending you didn't say it.

This is not pancakes and waffles. This is someone putting out a video saying a corporation is poisoning pancakes, and you at the same time say "the video is not trustworthy" while trying to claim you are not defending the corporation.

> You are awfully obsessed with stalking my comment history and then misquoting what I said.

I'm not stalking your "comment history", I'm just replying to comments in this post. Again, are you incapable of factual accuracy?

Re: Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection

#276

Post by HDThoreaun »

hedora wrote: post #268
thevinter wrote: post #69

There seems to be a lot of misinformation in the comments, I would assume because the linked article doesn't cover many of the developments. The youtuber Reckless Ben has recently covered the story and spearheaded a campaign of "provocative journalism" against the store[0]. Regardless of whether you support the way in which he goes about things, his video explains the story in much greater detail, and enormously expa…

All the other stuff dwarfs the theft of $200K. I'm hoping this leads to financial damages that are a large multiple of that number, and multiple jail sentences. Of course, that probably won't happen. I can imagine reform-oriented candidates running on putting an end to this sort of crap, and winning a local election or two. Speaking of which, I wonder if anything's come of the Afroman case in Ohio.

I dont see how B&M can even continue after this. The lego community is small. Why would a single person ever shop at one of their stores ever again? Maybe you can get some families trying to buy stuff for kids, but the vast majority of money here is adults that are very plugged into the lego scene and surely know about this.

Re: Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection

#277

Post by gamblor956 »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #18
gkoberger wrote: post #11

I'm really confused by this blog. There seems to be a large portion of the story missing. I can't figure out the correlation between the owner losing their franchise and the rest of the story. Why did they want to steal the sets? If they're really a $400M company (whatever that means), why would they do this over (at most) $200k? I couldn't figure out what is being claimed here. I'm not saying it's not true, I just c…

It's not that hard to understand. A man gave a store merchandise on consignment, signed a contract with the store manager. The manager lost control of the store to corporate. The goods were still there, still on display and being sold. Corporate says, "this is mine now" and refuses to honor the contract. "It wasn't our name on it, says right here that the previous store manager signed this, and she's no longer with u…

If the consignment contract was not legal then BAM never owned the goods and would not have had the right to sell them.

EDIT: as other commenters point out, BAM actually did lose the lawsuit over this and now the issue is the consigner is trying to collect the judgment. In that case it would normally be irrelevant that the store was a franchise location, because BAM would have become the successor to all liabilities upon taking over the store (in the U.S., at least). With deep pockets BAM could drag out the collections process long enough to try an extract a settlement from the consigner; the risk with doing so though is that interest accrues on the settlement at statutory rates that are normally higher than market rates and they face the possibility of court sanctions for any attempts at delay that have no reasonable legal basis.

Re: Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection

#278

Post by busterarm »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #123
throwaway85825 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mormonism is the original cult that survived the first generation. It has all the hallmarks of a cult, singular charismatic leader, polygamy, child abuse, apocalyptic prophecy etc.

Child abuse is not an official sanctioned thing in Mormonism. And they have officially ended the practice of polygamy (yes there was some coercion on the part of the US govt) The other three were pretty much traits of every major traditional religion at its founding.

It can be a religion in its beliefs and a cult in its practices and that's exactly what's going on -- especially since it's Utah that we're talking about...

I have very close Mormon and ex-Mormon friends and have dealt with lots of Scientologists via community involvement in music and science fiction...there is no difference.

A married couple that are friends of mine had minor questions of faith and their entire large extended families with immediate no-contact. It was bitter, brutal and painful even as a bystander seeing it happen in real time. Their young children were cut off as well and their families hounded them and made their lives miserable via institutions (police calls, anonymous complaints to their schools & jobs, etc.). The behavior was beyond the pale and this couple are literally the nicest, most loving and reasonable people that I have ever met.

They switched to a different Christian denomination and raised their kids that way and couldn't be happier about their decision. In hindsight. The family wounds 20 years later are still very visible and real.

Re: Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection

#279

Post by gamblor956 »

munk-a wrote: post #256
crazygringo wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the end of the blog post says the man sued and won . But the store closed to get out of paying. Which makes no sense if the store was corporate-owned. So why isn't the corporation paying?

The store in question was a franchise so potentially the liability will be limited to just the assets of that franchise. But there's a lot of weird stuff here and it looks like the corporation may have (in a legally questionable manner) removed assets from the store to the corporation during proceedings to shield them.

Courts are allowed to pierce the corporate veil when that happens.

Re: Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection

#280

Post by HDThoreaun »

charcircuit wrote: post #184
throwaway85825 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the criminal investigation start before or after the social media campaign. I suspect after.

It happened before part 1 from Reckless Ben was released. So it was before this latest wave of attention.

My understanding is that Ben was making a fuss and got local media to report on the story before he released any videos.
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