How Lego became the black market’s hottest trade

Summary

Podcast Summary: How Lego Became the Black Market’s Hottest Trade

The Morning Edition, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald
Host: Samantha Selinger-Morris
Guest: Chris Vitelago, Senior Reporter
Date: April 19, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into an unexpected story: how Lego, the iconic children's toy, has become a favored asset among Australia’s organized crime gangs. Senior reporter Chris Vitelago describes how Lego’s high resale value, untraceability, and enduring consumer demand have turned it into both a target for theft and a novel tool for money laundering. The conversation explores retail challenges, black market economics, and the oddities of a criminal underworld increasingly trading in “plastic gold.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis of the Story: Lego Under Lock and Key

• [01:22] Chris Vitelago shares his personal experience in a Melbourne Kmart, discovering that even cheap Lego sets are kept in locked cabinets due to rampant theft.
• "She hand carried them down a flight of stairs to the cash register and then basically kept them in her hand until we had scanned our credit cards and then hands over this box of Lego, this $12 piece of Lego." ([02:00])
• Not only high-ticket sets, but even entry-level items are tightly secured; all major retailers have varying levels of protection.

2. Why Lego? The Black Market Allure

• Types of Thieves:
  • Opportunists — “smash and grab” for a quick turnaround, often drug-dependent ([03:25])
  • Sophisticated operators — large-scale, organized retail theft rings
• Retained Value: Unlike most consumer goods, Lego sets maintain 50% or more of their retail value when sold on the black market.
• "Almost nobody throws LEGO out, right? ...I called it in the story Plastic Gold." ([04:20])
• Minifigures (Minifigs):
  • Secondary market for rare minifigs can be exorbitantly high, up to $400 per piece ([05:00])
  • Demand constantly shifts among themes—currently, Ninjago, Disney, and botanicals are popular ([06:17])

3. Criminal Appeal: Untraceable, Valuable, and Liquid

• Lack of Serial Numbers:
  • Lego sets can’t be individually traced, even in original packaging ([06:17])
• Easy Conduit for Laundering:
  • Large volumes can be bought with cash and resold openly on eBay or Facebook Marketplace for clean money ([10:41])
  • "You can take $25,000 worth of dirty cash and buy Lego sets and then sell them quite openly ...It's not illegal." ([10:41])
• Evidence at Crime Scenes:
  • Police often find substantial Lego stockpiles next to cash and drugs at busts ([08:51])
  • "There was, there was a case in Melbourne a couple of years ago...Inside was an entire bespoke methamphetamine Lab...And next to it was tens of thousands of dollars worth of Lego." ([08:51])

4. Escalation: Violence and Large-scale Theft

• Incidents of Violence:
  • Not common, but burglaries and robberies have become more brazen.
  • Example: Six masked men robbing a store, stealing 130+ sets in under ten minutes ([09:36])
  • Most large retailers instruct staff not to pursue thieves out of concern for safety.
• Heist Examples:
  • Adelaide police found $320,000 worth of Lego in a garage ([11:42])
  • Recent U.S. bust netted an estimated $1.4 million in stolen Lego ([12:18])

5. Wider Context: Global Spread & Reluctance to Comment

• The phenomenon is international, with large criminal seizures reported in the U.S. and elsewhere shortly after the publication of Vitelago’s story ([12:18])
• Retailers and Lego itself refuse to discuss the problem, likely due to concerns about brand image ([12:53])
• "Lego certainly wouldn't talk about it yet." ([12:59])

6. Societal Trends & Retail Theft Surge

• Australian retail theft, in general, has spiked, with links to cost-of-living pressures ([14:31])
• Australia is now perceived as a “market leader” in retail theft, reversing a downward trend from past years.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• Chris Vitelago on Lego’s Market Value:
  "With so many other products at this price point ... they have serial numbers ... LEGO has no low serial numbers. They're effectively untraceable even in its original packaging, never opened." ([06:17])

• On the Emotional Attachment and Allure:
  "I've spoken to people since who's who've messaged me after I wrote the story saying I got every LEGO piece of LEGO I had since I was six." ([04:05])

• On Law Enforcement Discoveries:
  "I've seen casino chips, gold bars, but something like this Lego, I never would have picked it when I started this." ([09:34])

• On Corporate Silence:
  "Wes Farmers, which owns Kmart and Target, would, wouldn't talk to me about it. Woolworths, who owns Big W, wouldn't talk about it. Lego certainly wouldn't talk about it yet." ([12:59])

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Notable Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:22] — Chris’s firsthand account of discovering Lego security in retail
• [03:25] — Types of Lego thieves and black market value
• [05:00] — The cult of minifigures explained
• [06:17] — Why Lego is untraceable and highly liquid as a criminal asset
• [08:51] — Lego discovered at organized crime scenes and its use alongside drug labs
• [09:36] — Violent theft incidents and retail responses
• [10:41] — How criminals launder money via Lego resale platforms
• [12:18] — Scale of international Lego heists
• [12:59] — Corporate reluctance to address the problem
• [14:31] — Australian retail theft surge amid economic pressures

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Tone and Language

The conversation is informed, lively, and at times bemused by the surreal nature of the crime—treating Lego theft with both investigative rigor and a wry appreciation for the strangeness of “plastic gold” converging with illicit trade.

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For Listeners

This episode offers a compelling, accessible breakdown of a surprising criminal trend. It explores the dynamics of value, security, and societal change—revealing why that box of Lego could be worth more than you think, on the shelf or in a criminal’s garage.

“I'm definitely making sure they don't get sucked up in a vacuum cleaner or eaten by the dog.” — Chris Vitelago ([14:49])

Transcript

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[Samantha Sellinger Morris]

Just picture it. Under the COVID of night, police detectives raid a clandestine drug lab in Melbourne belonging to an organized crime gang. But instead of picking through just the usual beakers, wads of cash, and perhaps the unmistakable acetone odor of ice, they stumble on something else. Boxes upon boxes of Lego. I'm Samantha Sellinger Morris, and you're listening to the morning edition from the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. Today, senior reporter Chris Vitelago on why your kid's favorite toy has become the underworld's new favorite currency and why it's so good for laundering dirty money. It's April 20th.

[Podcast Host]

Welcome back, Chris, to the podcast.

[Chris Vitelago]

Thank you.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, you've got to tell us, how did you first cotton onto this story?

[Chris Vitelago]

Well, it's the strangest thing. So I was in Melbourne, cbd. I was supposed to be going to an appointment. I got the calendar wrong. So I had this time to kill. And my kid started to really get into Lego. And so I thought he'd been really good recently. So I thought, you know what, I'll go to Kmart in the city and I'll buy a small piece of Lego. So I go into the city, Kmart, and it's two floors and you go up to the top floor where the Lego is, except all the really good stuff. What I wanted, what he wanted was Star Wars Lego. It was behind this locked glass cabinet. And when I got there, there's this blue button. It says, you know, push for service. And there's this woman already there kind of banging on the button. And I said, what's going on? She says, well, we can't get it without someone coming up. So we must have waited 10 minutes for pushing on this button for someone to come from the service counter downstairs to come up to unlock the cabinet. And I just wanted this little, little $12 Star wars thing, which somehow is behind a locked cabinet.

[Podcast Host]

So it's like, it's like a random big store, but it's got like methadone clinic vibes. Is that what I'm hearing?

[Chris Vitelago]

It was, yeah, it was just, it was bizarre. Like you'd see this with if you wanted to buy a knife or over the counter medicine, someone getting in your face about the product. And so she wouldn't even give us the Lego that we'd each selected. The woman had selected and I had selected. She hand carried them down a flight of stairs to the cash register and then basically kept them in her hand until we had scanned our credit cards and then hands over this box of Lego, this $12 piece of Lego. And I was like, what is going on? And she said, we can't keep it on the shelves. People just steal it. They steal it all the time. And so because my kids getting into it, I started going all over the particularly different parts of the city trying to find different sets. And I was checking out the security at each one. Big W, Kmart, Target, the independent toy stores. And all of them had various levels of security. And I kept kind of noticing this trend and I kept asking questions to the people there, why do you have this thing bound up like a piece of jewelry in security tags? And they're like, because people grab it off the shelves and they run.

[Podcast Host]

So are they selling on a black market or is that, or is it a particular kind of LEGO people are stealing? Is it just Star wars something else?

[Chris Vitelago]

Well, you've got two types of people who steal lego. There's the opportunistic smash and grab thieves who basically go into a Kmart and grab a 50 or $100 set of Lego off the shelf and they run off with it. For them, who are usually trying to get a quick fix for drugs, LEGO is actually, it holds its value remarkably well on the black market. So $100 set of Lego will sell for $50, which is a great return for somebody with a drug problem who might be boosting something else, like a mobile phone or whatever. It doesn't hold its value.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, wait, no, I've got to stop you there. So a car depreciates the second you drive it off the lot, like every note. Heck is lego? Why do you get such a different turn for lego?

[Chris Vitelago]

Well, this is the thing I discovered because I was also hunting for it for our own reasons. Is it. Almost nobody throws LEGO out, right? Like, you keep it, you keep. And I've spoken to people since who's who've messaged me after I wrote the story saying I got every LEGO piece of LEGO I had since I was six.

[Podcast Host]

And how old are these people now?

[Chris Vitelago]

In their 40s. And I started, I started going to like op shops and I'd ask the guy, have you got any Lego? And he goes, not me. We can't keep it here. As soon as somebody donates it, it disappears. Somebody will come and Buy it, throw out lego. They keep it or they sell it, or they shift it on. And there's always demand for it for some reason. It's. I. I called it in the story Plastic Gold.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, so to tell us why this is now, I told you before recording, I'm a massive LEGO nerd. I have collected my own minifigurines that, you know, somehow seem to me to be Canadian, a lumberjack. I've stretched it to a Yeti with an icy pole. Total stretch doesn't count, but whatever, in my own mind, it does. Why do people love lego?

[Chris Vitelago]

I mean, kids of all ages love it, right? And adults love it because what you can do with it. But I don't know, there's just something about it. And as I discovered, it's not just lego, but it's certain parts of lego. So what I learned was that a lot of the time, the set itself is not important. What's important is the minifigs inside of it. So the minifigs, the secondary market for minifigs is crazy. Like, I went to a shop and they were selling some of these minifigs, really exclusive ones for like 400 bucks.

[Podcast Host]

And for the uninitiated, that's short form for minifigurine. And so these are just the figurine with the movable arms and legs, the replaceable heads. They often have, you know, cool outfits. If it's a Star wars thing, they might actually have a fabric cape. Like, if it's Yoda.

[Chris Vitelago]

Yeah. And there's Harry Potter ones and there's. Yeah, there's Disney ones.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, so we love the minifigs. We get this now. You've told us they keep their value to a remarkable degree. But why are they such a target for criminals? Because, you know, keeping their value is one thing, but this has become a massive problem. Problem. You know, you spoke to one shop owner, Chris Herwood, he said it's an easy sell. It's so popular. There's so much of a market for it. There's all this talk about how it's a better asset than gold and stocks and things, and that's where your criminal gangs are getting into it. So tell us about why criminals have cottoned on to lego. Beyond the fact that they just, you know, keep their value relative to other

[Chris Vitelago]

items with so many other products at this price point or the higher price point and beyond. They have serial numbers on them, right? You can track a watch, you can track, like, a stereo system. LEGO has no low serial numbers. They're effectively. They're Untraceable even in its original packaging, never opened. The box itself can't be traced. At best the police can trace back to a batch that was on a pallet that left the factory at this particular time. So if you steal 10 sets of a particular type of LEGO, Star Wars, LEGO, they can't ever prove that you stole that unless they catch you red handed. But also there's a whole subset of LEGO that appreciates in value and sometimes dramatically appreciates in value. And that can be the big sets and it can be the small sets and it chastes change as well. Like apparently Star wars was big for a while, it's not anymore. Now it's Ninjago, sometimes it's Disney, sometimes it's like the specialty ones that look like flowers. It moves all over the place. But at the end of the day, like there's just constant demand for it.

[Samantha Sellinger Morris]

After the break.

[Chris Vitelago]

There was a case last year, a year before last, where men went into a shop during the middle of the day and held the shop up with effectively with a drill bit. And they threatened the owner and they took the Lego and they run.

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[Podcast Host]

Okay, so this explains, you know, why as you've written in your piece, you know, some Lego in certain shops is wrapped in anti theft cables that are attached to alarms. Other toy shops you've put have reinforced their doors and windows and installed special metal shutters to further protect their properties against RAM raids. This is crazy because we're talking about Lego. But Lego's also been turning up in large volumes during police raids on organized crime gangs over clandestine drug labs or millions of dollars worth of meth. So tell us, explain to us one of these situations or scenes when cops are trying to bust a meth gang and they're what? They're, they're coming on lego.

[Chris Vitelago]

Oh yeah, there was, there was a case in Melbourne a couple of years ago where they basically they found a storage locker, they opened the storage locker. Inside was an entire bespoke methamphetamine Lab packed up, ready to be shipped. And next to it was tens of thousands of dollars worth of Lego. And the reason these guys end up with LEGO as basically collateral evidence at crime scenes? Well, there's two things that work. One, they can shift it pretty easy for cash. They can trade it for cash or trade it for product. It's that untraceable element to it and sometimes like it shows up in volumes. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Lego, some of it collectible and some of it not. So, but it's strange when you start to see something like this turning up as collateral evidence. Like I've seen casino chips, gold bars, but something like this Lego, I never would have picked it when I started this.

[Podcast Host]

And it can be violent, right? Like, like there's one line in your story that was pretty scary. You wrote that. Last year in Victoria, LEGO reseller Brick Evolution was targeted by a professional burglary crew. Six men in ma gloves and headlamps broke into the Cheltenham store and cleaned out more than 130 sets in less than 10 minutes. Like, are people ever getting harmed during these thefts?

[Chris Vitelago]

Fortunately, in that case, that store was robbed in the middle of the night or in the very early morning. There was a case last year, a year before last, where men went into a shop during the middle of the day and held the shop up with, effectively with a drill bit and they, they threatened the owner and they, they took the Lego and they run. Violence is pretty unusual with this, although there are a lot of stores, particularly the big box stores, which are not going to appreciate me saying this, but the, basically the standing order is you don't chase them. If they grab and run, you let them go. That's what I've been told. Because they don't want violence and confrontation.

[Podcast Host]

And so criminals are now using Lego. Do I have this right to launder dirty money and hide their assets? If I've got that right. How, how are they doing that?

[Chris Vitelago]

It's stunning, right, because you can take $25,000 worth of dirty cash and buy Lego sets and then sell them quite openly on ebay or on Facebook Marketplace. You can transport them, you can store them. It's not illegal.

[Podcast Host]

So is that how criminals are generally offloading the stolen Lego? They're just selling it on ebay?

[Chris Vitelago]

It happens. I spent a lot of time on ebay and Facebook Marketplace looking at prices and sets. And so basically I went through all the big box retailers and I said, well, what are these? I picked five or six different types of Lego? And I said, what are the prices right now in a shop in the northern suburbs of Melbourne versus for that exact set what was on Facebook or Marketplace? And generally speaking, you'd see the exact same set, often marketed as brand new or unopened. Same set, exactly the same, same year, same model, just 25%, 30% lower. And some of the, some of these sellers, like, why would you have 14 sets of the exact same type of Lego? Like, it just defies belief. Why you have 14 unopened boxes of the same piece of Star Wars Lego Just.

[Podcast Host]

Or just Yetis. Like just Yetis and their environment? I mean, that's the one I want. But where else in the world is this happening? Because you wrote about a surprising number that were happening in Australia. You know, some of them, like you said, in the hundreds of thousands. Last month you wrote a police raid in Adelaide uncovered $320,000 worth of Lego hidden in the garage of a suburban home that was part of a sophisticated retail theft operation that had targeted to stores and retailers around the city. But what about elsewhere in the world? Like, is this just us LEGO freaks in Australia? Or should I say LEGO thieves in Australia? Or where is it happening elsewhere?

[Chris Vitelago]

It's happening everywhere. Funnily enough, after I filed this story, a day before it was published, there was another seizure in America, which I think was worth a million dollars. It's happening all over the place.

[Podcast Host]

Wait, 1.4 estimated million dollars. I mean, that is bananas.

[Chris Vitelago]

It's a lot of Lego. And if you can go online and see the footage from South Australia from a couple of weeks ago or from month, one of the TV crews got a, a drone as the police were unloading it. And they go up, you know, they go up in the back and you look at, it's. It was three trailer loads that the police had to haul away from that one house. 15 shipping pallets.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, so I've, I've got to ask, I mean, is Lego the company, A, do they know about this? And B, are they freaking out?

[Chris Vitelago]

They don't like to talk about it. Nobody wants to talk about it. Wes Farmers, which owns Kmart and Target, would, wouldn't talk to me about it. Woolworths, who owns Big W, wouldn't talk about it. Lego certainly wouldn't talk about it yet.

[Podcast Host]

They just don't want associated with robbers. Is that it? And crime.

[Chris Vitelago]

They just, yeah, they just don't want the, the brand reflection, I suppose. But they wouldn't even answer basic questions about how big is this issue? What are the steps that are being taken like, no, nobody wants to talk about it.

[Podcast Host]

So in the 90s and 2000s, you had Burberry grappling with the fact that they were associated with soccer hooligans. And now Lego.

[Chris Vitelago]

Yeah, There you go.

[Podcast Host]

A2 Lego. Okay, so I've got to ask, this is a random question, but in terms of global crime trends, like which countries does Australia generally follow? If we do, like if the States had this happening with the Lego first, just likely that we would follow.

[Chris Vitelago]

Well, look, 20 years ago, before the widespread Internet and social media and all the rest of it, countries did tend to to learn from each other. It's less so now because you can see things instantaneously. Right. Like I was talking before about, there's a famous case in, in Australia about smuggling ecstasy inside tomato tins. It was known as the tomato tins case was the world's largest ecstasy bust at the time. I didn't know until I went on a holiday to Las Vegas a couple years later. That idea was actually stolen from an idea the New York mafia had done in the 70s, which was putting heroin into monotons. You know, everything old is new again. And in some ways, we're market leaders in retail theft. Like, if you look at the statistics for general retail theft in Australia, it's off the charts in the last two years, which is interesting because for a while it was going down. Now it's just through the roof.

[Podcast Host]

Well, that dovetails with the cost of living crisis.

[Chris Vitelago]

Yes.

[Podcast Host]

Right, right. Okay. And so just to wrap up, Chris, I've got to ask you, like, are you now looking at your kids Lego stash with a slightly different eye? Are you just looking at those you builder figures, you know, with their adorable little like, briefcases and like, I'm definitely

[Chris Vitelago]

making sure they don't get sucked up in a vacuum cleaner or eaten by the dog?

[Podcast Host]

Well, I tell you what, it was such an interesting read, so thank you, Chris, as always for your time.

[Chris Vitelago]

Thank you.

[Samantha Sellinger Morris]

Today's episode was produced by Josh Towers.

[Podcast Host]

Our executive producer is Tammy Mills.

[Samantha Sellinger Morris]

And our podcasts are overseen by Lisa Muxworthy and Tom McKendrick. If you like our show, follow the morning edition and leave a review for us on Apple or Spotify. Thanks for listening.