It’s one Lego kit, a collection of small plastic bricks and related accessories. What could it cost? The answer, it turns out, could be thousands of dollars.
Lego kits and minifigures, figurines that are a little over 1.5 inches tall, are commanding high prices on the secondary market, with some, like the LEGO San Diego Comic-Con 2013 Spider-Man, valued as high as $16,846.
The children’s toys have even become something of an investing opportunity for those savvy enough to know what to look for.
But with the eye-popping price tags comes a dark side: Lego kits have become a hot commodity on the black market and the target of brazen thieves.
Last year, burglars hit Bricks & Minifigs outlets in California. Thieves made off with at least $100,000 worth of Lego kits and accessories.
Last month, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office in California recovered nearly 200 Lego sets after arresting a person in connection with a burglary at Crush Comics, a comic book store in Castro Valley, Calif.
Joshua Hunter, the owner of Crush Comics, said that members of his staff found the store’s stolen comic books for sale on eBay within hours of the theft.
The store worked with law enforcement and alerted other small business owners, including Five Little Monkeys, a toy store that recently had $7,000 worth of Lego stolen, to solve what turned out to be a spree of burglaries in the area.
Five Little Monkeys was able to recover a lot of its stolen Lego, said Meghan DeGoey, the company’s marketing director, but the theft was only the latest in what has been a growing problem.
“It’s been a problem for probably, I mean, forever, but it’s really ramped up in the last five, six years,” she said.
Five Little Monkeys has eight stores around the Bay Area, said Ms. DeGoey, and Lego stands out among its top-stolen items.
“People are really brazen when they’re going to steal,” she said, describing the way thieves will sometimes come into a store and walk right out or “do some like crazy misdirect and have a second person that tries to distract us.”
“It’s for a Lego, like for pieces of plastic, just everybody think about that,” she said.
The Lego Group, the makers of Lego, did not respond to requests for comment about the black market for its products. (The company says, by the way, that the plural of Lego is Lego, and “never, ever” Legos.)
Lego sets spend an average of two years on store shelves, and then those kits are not manufactured again, according to Shane O’Farrell, who has built a community with his Lego investing YouTube channel, where he informs others on how to get started.
The secondary Lego market is fueled by this scarcity as collectors look to complete their sets. This also means it’s not just limited editions or rare variants that go up in price — even the cheaper kits increase in value over time, he said.
Calling the underground market for Lego “unfortunate,” Mr. O’Farrell said he’s not surprised at its emergence. Lego are just like other coveted merchandise, like shoes, Pokémon cards and jewelry, that are stolen and then resold.
Other valuable Lego kits include a Piper airplane (valued at nearly $13,000); a T-rex kit (nearly $9,000); and a castle (nearly $8,500), according to the website BrickEconomy, which tracks the Lego market and trends.
“It is something that people love and it’s something that it’s easy to sell,” Mr. O’Farrell said, emphasizing that the Lego black market is “not good for anybody.”
Mr. O’Farrell stumbled onto the world of Lego investing in 2017 after he moved to the United States from Ireland and looked up a few Lego sets from his childhood purely out of nostalgia.
Then he noticed the pricing.
“The more I kind of looked into it, the more I realized it wasn’t just one or two Lego sets that were going up in value, it was like the entire market was going up in value,” he said. “It’s a very uncommon way to invest, but it’s a very sure thing from the research that I was doing.”
Mr. O’Farrell said he made $500,000 in sales in 2023. Last year, he made $250,000 in sales after purposely shrinking his business after the birth of his daughter.
Read Hayes, a research scientist and criminologist at the University of Florida and the executive director of the Loss Prevention Research Council, said the Lego black market caters to collectors in search of a “very coveted item.”
“It’s not exactly like art theft, but to a certain extent, there are collectors that just aren’t bothered by buying somebody else’s property that was stolen from them,” he said.
