Fascinating story, guy prints 'fake' UPC codes, attaches them to boxes of Lego, checks out. Presumably he has some collection of UPC codes for Lego.

One of the side effects of moving to scanned stuff is the number of errors of course. That is why you have a checker who can note problems, of course they don't pay them enough to bring the problems to the attention of the the store but that is a different issue.

I'm guessing this guy got flagged because stores were selling more product than they had in stock, and inventory wasn't finding other product that they thought they did have in stock. Given the detail Target has on shoppers (see the NYT article) I'm surprised this sort of fraud wouldn't just pop out in the daily totals.

A crime of passion, I think. He could have done this with anything at Target but he chose Lego. Apparently he assembled all of the sets himself before reselling them on eBay as "used," nicking into his profits. This guy was into Lego.