Jarrelle Augustine’s alleged scheme was almost elegant. Buy a $400 LEGO Star Wars set. Pour the bricks out at home. Refill the box with dry pasta, which rattles just enough to fool a return clerk. Reseal it. Bring it back for a full refund.
Irvine police say the 28-year-old Paramount, California, resident ran that playbook roughly 70 times at Target stores in California, Texas, Tennessee, New Jersey and Florida, netting about $34,000 in fraudulent refunds before officers tracked him to a Los Angeles County apartment on April 15 and found the unboxed bricks stockpiled inside (1).
Investigators said the dried “durum wheat semolina” pasta Augustine used mimicked the weight and sound of LEGO bricks shifting inside a sealed box.
The targets weren’t random. “These were Star Wars sets and Marvel sets, which have a very high value on the secondary market,” Officer Ziggy Azarcon told CBS News (2).
Just a week before Augustine’s arrest, on April 8, Kern County deputies recovered roughly $1 million worth of stolen LEGO sets after spotting two Amazon-branded box trucks fleeing a scene in Mojave (3). Investigators later located two abandoned freight trailers that had been stolen while transporting goods from Fort Worth, Texas, to Moreno Valley, California. Three Southern California men were booked on cargo theft, possession of a stolen vehicle and conspiracy charges.
Six months earlier, Santa Rosa police served a warrant at a Lake County home and walked into what looked like a LEGO crime scene: tens of thousands of loose pieces scattered across desks, hundreds of minifigures beheaded and sorted by facial expression, unopened sets stacked along the hallway walls (4). The total seized LEGO was valued at just over $6,000, but detectives described the setup as a “systematic” fencing operation. Robert Lopez, 39, was charged with organized retail theft after allegedly directing others to steal sets from Walmart and Target, then buying the stolen goods at a discount to flip online.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, the fallout ran longer. Former Wells Fargo banker Ryan Cahill was sentenced in November 2025 to a minimum of six years in prison for fencing more than $100,000 worth of LEGO toys stolen from area Walmart and Target stores (5). Federal filings had earlier alleged Cahill moved roughly $225,000 through an eBay account called “brikbybrik” (6).
Story Continues
Retailers are adapting. Walmart has locked LEGO sets behind anti-theft glass cases in some U.S. stores, forcing customers to flag down staff to buy.
Sets are small, light, universally recognized and carry no serial numbers. Police have publicly flagged the “untraceable nature” of the product as a reason it keeps surfacing in organized retail crime cases. The secondary market — eBay, Facebook Marketplace, BrickLink — makes fencing nearly frictionless.
Retail prices have climbed to the point where the math genuinely favors thieves. The Ultimate Collector Series Millennium Falcon retails at $849.99 on the LEGO shop (7). Retired sets appreciate like collectibles: a 2007 Café Corner set with an original sticker price of $139.99 now trades for roughly $2,500 on the secondary market, according to tracker Brickset (8).
That isn’t just anecdotal. A 2022 study by economists at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, published in Research in International Business and Finance, analyzed secondary-market prices for 2,322 LEGO sets released between 1987 and 2015 and found retired sets generated an average annual return of 11%, outperforming gold, large-cap stocks and corporate bonds over the same period (9). Some sets delivered 600% to 700% returns; others lost value. The paper’s title captured the pitch: “LEGO — The Toy of Smart Investors.”
LEGO has leaned into this dynamic. The company launched its 18+ product line in 2020, since rebranded as LEGO Icons, and reported record 2024 revenue of 74.3 billion Danish kroner ($10.8 billion), up 13% year over year, with operating profit of 18.7 billion DKK (10). It’s a privately held Danish company owned by the Kirk Kristiansen family through holding firm Kirkbi, which controls 75% of the group.
Cargo theft nationwide reached an estimated $725 million in losses in 2025, a 60% jump from 2024, according to Verisk CargoNet’s annual analysis (11). The average value per theft climbed 36% to $273,990. Criminal groups have grown more selective, chasing high-value shipments rather than opportunistic grabs — which is exactly the pattern the Kern County bust fits. Notably, Kern County itself saw an 82% year-over-year jump in cargo theft incidents in 2025 per CargoNet, the largest increase of any California county.
California’s Organized Retail Crime Task Force seized more than 272,000 stolen items in 2025 alone through 734 investigations, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced in January. That’s up from just 24 investigations in 2019, a 31-fold jump in state-level ORC casework over six years (12). Separately, state-funded local operations between October 2023 and June 2025 recovered more than $190 million in stolen goods and arrested over 25,675 suspects (13).
For consumers, the LEGO boom cuts two ways. Retired sets can be genuine alternative assets — but buying on the secondary market means navigating an inventory where a portion is stolen. Authentication, provenance and suspiciously steep discounts are worth a harder look. For someone like Augustine, cashing in apparently required only a grocery item and a straight face.
Join 250,000+ readers and get Moneywise’s best stories and exclusive interviews first — clear insights curated and delivered weekly. Subscribe now.
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our editorial ethics and guidelines.
NBC Los Angeles (1); CBS News (2, 3); The New York Times (4); Inc. (5); WBTV Charlotte (6); LEGO Group (7, 10); Brickset (8); Research in International Business and Finance (9); Verisk CargoNet (11); Office of Governor Gavin Newsom (12, 13)
This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: California man allegedly swapped LEGO bricks for dry pasta, returned 70 boxes to Target for $34K in refunds
This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.