So I just had one of those 'fall down a massive YouTube rabbit hole because it's too hot to do anything else' weekends and ended up learning about the Bricks and Minifigs vs. Reckless Ben legal dispute, which is now the ONLY currently-ongoing legal drama I ever want to hear about. For the uninitiated, Bricks and Minifigs is a chain of Lego consignment stores where people can buy and sell old lego sets (as the name implies). One particular Bricks and Minifigs store in Salem Oregon got a consignment deal with an elderly man and his son for a collection of Star Wars Lego sets that was worth roughly $200,000 total. The reason the family was selling the collection was to pay for the old man's healthcare. A few months later, corporate seized the store and used an extremely tenuous legal loophole to weasel their way out of paying the family per the consignment deal. When the family confronted the store about this and demanded to have their legos returned to them, they got banned from the premises and threatened with hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of court battles.
Enter Reckless Ben, an investigative journalist/youtuber who is basically the real-life equivalent of Napoleon Dynamite fused with Sun Tzu. He's taken it on himself to get this family their legos back. His methods so far include, but are not limited to:
Going to the store and politely asking the manager to return the family's legos to them
Hosting a fake youtube challenge for the employees at the store and inducting the winner into a cult he created for the sole purpose of getting the new store owner's phone number, so that he can politely ask him to return the legos, since asking the manager didn't work
Creating an official, legally recognized company called We Steal From Old People, and selling their merch from a booth set up outside the Bricks and Minifigs store
Applying for a gambler's license and using The Church of Scientology Sucks (the legally recognized religion that he created during his Scientology investigation a few years back) to hold a lottery for one of the missing lego sets, thereby making Bricks and Minifigs guilty of stealing from a lottery, which is a criminal offense that the police are legally required to investigate
Having 9 of his friends each purchase $10,000 worth of the stolen legos from the family so that all ten of them could individually file small claims cases against Bricks and Minifigs. They won all of those cases btw. Bricks and Minifigs shut down the store in Salem before they could be forced to pay
Now it's worth noting that when he started this investigation, literally all Ben wanted was to get this family their legos back. But somehow this ended up snowballing into uncovering serious corruption within the American Fork Police Department, who as it turns out have been in the Bricks and Minifigs CEO's back pocket this entire time. Ben's had his car searched, his house raided, and been arrested and jailed without being told what he was even being charged with (which is a massive civil rights violation, and is supposed to be very illegal in the US). He's had to resort to hiding out in Mexico to get the Lego Mafia off his back while he lawyers up and prepares to go back to court against Bricks and Minifigs, because yeah, they still haven't returned/paid for the legos they stole from the sick elderly man, in spite of the fact that the entire world now knows what they did and hates them for it. In fact, they are now trying to sue the old man and Ben for 1.5 million dollars, for the heinous crime of....proving that they stole $200,000 worth of legos. Ben says he's still willing to settle with them outside of court however, provided they return the stolen legos and send him a video of the scummy CEOs verbally apologizing for their actions and doing the chicken dance as a show of good faith. Meanwhile, the American Fork PD is most likely going to be hit with a lawsuit of their own thanks to Ben's public documentation of their corrupt behavior, which includes initially redacted bodycam footage that shows the cops literally conspiring with the Bricks and Minifigs CEO to come up with reasons to have Ben thrown in jail.
My favorite part of this story, by the way, is the fact that the demonstrably villainous lego CEO actually has a Twirly Evil Villain Mustache.
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