A Lego Rabbit Hole
A member of Gen-Z persuaded me to watch a YouTube video made by somebody who gave all of the kind of off-putting energy that Gen-Z YouTube personalities give. Pranks, silliness, youthful self-centredness, and activities that, if you were the target of them, you would reasonably call harassment. Except…the longer it went on, the more I got won over to the guy’s apparent cause. I don’t want to mislead you. I found a lot of the video irritating, and some of what he and his friends do is just stupid, but as the things escalate in the story, some bigger issues emerge. The video by Ben Schneider aka “Reckless Ben” is here if you want to watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wscQpkcwgNU. However, here are some news articles https://www.brickfanatics.com/bricks-and-minifigs-dispute-200k-lego-collection https://salembusinessjournal.org/2026/03/30/keizer-lego-dispute-star-wars-collection/ that cover some of the issues.
I did find this video, which is calmer and more analytical about the legal issues involved https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14ktgvoH4Mc&t=280s, but again, I’m not familiar with the guy who made that video or whether what he is saying is correct. It’s the internet! Also, it’s internet drama, so do please keep your sceptical glasses on.
This is internet drama, but it is also internet drama that connects two things: corporate behaviour intersecting with a community with a specialist interest i.e. a kind of fandom. For both good and bad, that’s something this blog is interested in, although in this case, the fandom is collectors of Lego. I like Lego but I’m not a fan of it, but I can see how it is exactly the kind of activity that would generate a substantial community of people who build and collect Lego sets. What I wasn’t aware of was the size of the secondary business around Lego. Apparently, there are many stores that resell Lego sets, following a business approach not unlike comic books stores (if they still exist) or video game stores (again, if they still exist) – buying up people’s collections and selling them on.
The basic story is as follows, but note that lots of claims in this are disputed and much of the reporting on the issue has been prompted by Ben Schneider’s video going viral.
In Salem, Oregon a franchise of a the chain of “Bricks & Minifigs” entered into a consignment agreement with a collector1 of Star Wars-themed Lego sets. The agreement2 was that the store would sell off the collection, but while it was being sold, the collector would still own the unsold Lego sets. As each set was sold, the collector would get paid, and the store would get a percentage of the sale. The collection is huge, and apparently worth hundreds of thousands of US dollars3.
Things go awry when the parent company, Bricks and Minifigs ends the franchise agreement with the original franchisee and ownership of the store passes to a new owner. Events around this shift in ownership are disputed, and the reasons for it are not well explained in the video, but some of the secondary coverage has more details.
With the change in ownership, the collector discovers that the shop is no longer willing to recognise the deal. The collector is obviously deeply unhappy about this because there is a lot of money involved. However, the collector can’t afford legal action to get the Lego returned. There are various attempts to get the Lego back, as well as back and forth between the franchise owner and the main corporation.
I think maybe a year later, YouTuber Ben Schneider and his friends get involved. Basically, he latches onto a cause where he can do various pranks aimed at the Salem store, while claiming it is all for the just cause of getting the Legos back. Some of the stunts are funny. Some, yup, look illegal or a form of harassment. Yet, as it drags on, it does look like there is something very off about the situation. The franchise owner keeps challenging them to sue him. Eventually, Schneider devises a method to do that.
My initial thoughts when watching the video were “small claims court”, but later in the video, it is explained that the amount of money involved in the dispute exceeds the limit that a small claims court in Oregon will handle. Schneider’s plan sounds like something that probably shouldn’t work, especially if you explain the plan on a video with all the people involved. Schneider and several of his friends “buy” individual Lego sets from the collector. Now each one of these people has a legitimate4 claim against the store, which is holding their property. So rather than one big lawsuit, they can now lodge 10 smaller lawsuits that are each below the limit of the small claims court.
Astonishingly, this works. The lawsuits are filed, and then the franchise owners DO NOT SHOW UP5 to court. The YouTubers/collector wins by default.
The twist at the end, is that when the Schneider arrives at the shop to collect the money and/or the Lego, the shop has permanently closed.
The video goes viral, and as a consequence, not just the parent company but other Bricks & Minifigs stores, and indeed some unrelated Lego stores, start getting internet harassment. Schneider does state that people should not do that, but we know how these things work. We’ve seen how internet toxicity works, and you only need a small subset of people to act in a nasty way for things to get poisoned very quickly.
That’s not the only issue, though, and here is where things start intersecting with this blog’s interest even further.
A running theme in Schneider’s video is how the store weaponises the police. To be fair to the store, if I were a store owner being targeted by YouTube pranksters, I might want somebody to haul them away. Even so, Schneider points out that it is the store who are the thieves, but the police are protecting them.
Having watched the video, I discussed that point with the Gen-Z friend who made me watch the video in the first place. Police protect property, but in particular, they will protect the possessors of property who have the superficial appearance of respectability. They are less inclined to protect the property of marginalised people, and are an active threat to the property of homeless people – and I’m talking about Australian police. US police? Well, the record of US police departments engaged in schemes that look like active theft is a whole other story.
“Oh,” says my Gen-Z friend, “You need to see the video that’s on his Patreon.” So then I watch another video on my friend’s phone…
Ben Schneider has a second video on the story on his Patreon, which will move to YouTube at some point. He has (apparently) a third video in the works, but that has been delayed because he is in Mexico to avoid being arrested.
He and his chums had won their small claims court case. However, winning a case did not get them or the collector their Lego or money back. To get the money, they would need to sue the owners again to get the money/property that the court said they are owed. An attempt to file a new suit hit a hurdle – they needed to show the court that they had made an attempt to resolve the issue outside of court by talking to the owners of the franchise.
They managed to find the addresses of the two men who own the franchise. Both men live in Utah, in the town of American Fork6. Neither guy will talk to Schneider, and the police are called. That does, at least, mean Schneider now has enough to proceed with at least one court case. However, that means he needs to get a process server to serve one of the owners court papers. I don’t really know how that works, except from seeing people being served papers in US TV shows.
Schneider and his friends are then subjected to a series of escalating encounters with the American Fork police department. At one point, their car is pulled over and searched for drugs, and they are accused of possessing heroin. As none of them possesses heroin or is on drugs, this goes nowhere, but is clearly intended as harassment.
Matters get even worse when the Air-BnB the group is staying at has a full-on weapons-drawn police raid. The group are handcuffed and arrested.
With the process-serving plan not working, the next plan is to set up a GoFundMe to raise money to compensate the collector. This is still a stunt, and the group attempts to film themselves with a banner accusing the owners of the franchise of theft. That accusation would be libellous in the UK, but maybe not in the US. Either way, it wouldn’t be a criminal act.
Schneider is arrested again and is threatened with five years in gaol7.
Well, now Utah is involved, and so is the Church of the Latter-day Saints, along with possibly dodgy business practices and money-making schemes. The LDS has been a recurring theme here since the blog started, due to the presence of Utah-based personalities in the Sad Puppies.
I’ve known more ex-Mormons than actual Mormons, but all the Mormons of either kind I’ve met have been nice people. I think the LDS church itself is both corrupt and a net force for bad in this world, but then that’s true of lots of institutional religions, including the one I was brought up in. That doesn’t mean the LDS never does good things or is incapable of change, indeed it has changed itself for the better on more than one occasion.
However, there are definitely some questions to be asked about the cult-like aspects of Mormonism. In particular, the church marries aspects of US nationalism, the specific work-hard-to-get-rich culture of US individualism, and a collective protectiveness of an in-group. That protectiveness arises partly out a genuine history of repression and prejudice against Mormons, often from fellow right-wing US Christians. What it also means is that Utah is particularly susceptible to fraud.
Utah has a reputation for fraud; it has the most Ponzi schemes in the US (per capita), Utah is a major centre of Multi-Level Marketing schemes. The high trust culture and in-group dynamic make the LDS community particularly vulnerable to affinity fraud, while the stress on personal self-advancement makes dubious business practices more attractive. Ironically, the fact that many Mormons are genuinely nice8, trusting people, means that fraudsters are drawn to Utah.
Schneider’s video suggests another aspect of the issue. Accusations of fraud or bad business dealings that come from outside the community may well be seen as threats to the community by institutions. This is also true of accusations that come from lower-status people within a community – a dynamic that has enabled abuse in a wide range of religious organisations and communities, especially the Catholic Church.
I don’t think the whole Lego issue has played out yet. Noise from the story has spilled out beyond the Lego collecting community, and that means there is likely to be more lawsuits and counter lawsuits before everything is done.
It could be that Schneider’s narrative is substantially wrong in places. It is a cliché to say that things are often more complicated than they seem. However, even so, I think what I’ve seen so far aligns with known issues in terms of access to legal remedies and the degree to which the police will align with wealth & capital.
Technically the adult son of the collector ↩︎The nature of the agreement is disputed ↩︎$200,000 is repeatedly quoted in the video, but Ben Schnieder concedes that this is an upper figure for the whole collection, some of which had already been sold when things go awry. ↩︎I’m not a lawyer, but to me this sounds dubious ↩︎Possibly, due to shenanigans by the YouTubers to make the shop think this is just another stupid prank and that the court filings are fake ↩︎Not to be confused with Spanish Fork where the guy who stole the money for Vox Day’s superhero film lived. ↩︎Probably threatened with five years in jail, but gaol sounds worse ↩︎OK, how nice are you if you are paying more to an organisation that actively funds bigotry needs to be acknowledged ↩︎
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