Thieves attempt to sell off stolen comic book collection... at the victim's own comic shop

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/12/thieves-attempt-to-sell-off-st.html

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Meddling!

headline of the year.

the photo with the piece is classic as well.

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Do the crime, you do the time.

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“Me and my boyfriend, we do storage units”

A burst of honesty among thieves.

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One wonders whether comics that are so treasured they live in a storage unit wouldn’t actually be better off with a new home. (Not saying burglary is the answer, but maybe this could inspire the owner to sell them or something. They are doing no good in the world rotting in storage.)

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Trapped In a World They Never Made.
Foiled by a Being with Greater Powers than they ever imagined!

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Worst Thieves Ever!

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That’s some nice judgement you’ve got there. I’m glad you’ve got this all figured out for us.

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“Wicked” <—

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I suspect they try to pretend they buy storage unit auctions like on Storage Wars as a front for their burglary. They’ve likely stolen a lot more than comics. One of them may even work for a storage unit company or have an accomplice who does in order to minimize risk. The cops should have no trouble getting a warrant for wherever they keep the loot and if they can figure out who it belongs to, the couple could be facing as many counts of burglary as storage unit thefts they can find the victims of.

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Well, I assume she was referring to storage unit auctions. I can’t imagine she’d admit it was stolen property when trying to sell to a legitimate business.

Um…

In his case, he had rented the locker to clear some space while renovating his home

I’m unclear what “good” a bunch of comics are supposed to be doing anyone in the first place, though. It’s not like those comics aren’t all accessible as digital versions. The printed copies only function as mementos and collectables, as in this case.

Not so dumb - a comic store would be the logical place to sell them, and the odds that they had stolen from the comic store’s owner have got to be astronomically low…

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Still, I’m no master thief, but I would think fencing stolen goods within a couple hundred miles/km of where they were stolen would be a little stupid. But yeah, bad luck, or in this case karma, came knocking.

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Didn’t I see this in the film Paper Moon, except the stolen items were crates of bootlegged whiskey?

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Well, it’s probably only very slightly safer to sell further afield, so it’s not worth the time and money required to make multiple trips that distance (especially for something that’s only worth a few hundred bucks at most). Perhaps the thieves felt that being about 30 miles away from the site of their thefts was enough, and could very well have been unaware that the store itself was only about 3 miles away. But even so, the odds that a nearby theft would be related to the potential buyer were in their favor.

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That’s what makes me think they’ve probably done this many times. Either they were just really unlucky, or the odds finally caught up with them. Either way, glad they got pinched.

Also, anybody else loving that Spiderman blazer?

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If that thought finally hit the woman, then this (reported in the article) could have only made her feel cartoony worst:

Cops sat the woman at a table in the back of the shop, questioning her as a cardboard cutout of Batman glowered over the scene.

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Something similar happened to my dad. A bunch of his old comics were stolen out of our basement storage room, and the thief tried selling them to the local comic shop that my dad had been regularly shopping at for over 20 years. They knew to keep an eye out, and helped him file a police report. Thief ended up doing a not-insignificant amount of time, as it wasn’t his first time at this particular dance.

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Yeah, it seems like they had made a business out of this - selling off the contents of storage units they had broken into. (They seemed to be at least semi-competent in that, in that they broke into units with no camera coverage and hadn’t ever been caught.) They did something, it worked, they continued doing it… until it didn’t work.

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Investigators would’ve just followed the paper trail :grin:

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