Heist near Washington's SeaTac airport this week included hardware worth around $2.1 million; police have no leads yet.
In a warehouse heist this weekend near Washington's SeaTac airport, thieves stole 7,000 Wii U consoles, estimated at a value of $2.1 million.
"I've been a cop for 28 years, and I've never seen anything like this," Sgt. Cindy West told ABC News. "This has come straight out of the movies."
According to West, the bandits drove two diesel trucks into Nintendo's distribution bay at Seattle Air Cargo. Once inside, the thieves lifted the Wii U units with forklifts onto 53-foot semi trailers waiting outside. This took place during a storm.
Workers noticed the missing inventory, as well as the vanished trucks, Sunday. Police do not have any leads at this moment, and it is not clear how many were involved in the heist.
"If we don’t get any tips ahead of time, it will be the selling of these consoles that will lead to their capture," West said. "It's gonna be pretty hard to hide 7,000 Wii game consoles."
ABC News reported the stolen consoles as original Wii systems, but Kotaku confirmed with the King County Sheriff's Office that the units were in fact Wii U consoles. With an average price of $300, the thieves made off with about $2.1 million worth of hardware.
Eddie Makuch (Mack-ooh) is a News Editor at GameSpot. He works out of the company's Boston office in Somerville, Mass., and loves extra chunky peanut butter.
Forgot to add that, each of those consoles that are missing from the inventory listings in the warehouse have some form of unique indentifier that you could simply compare with of any consoles that are connected to the Nintendo Network... -_- Wonder how the thieves will bypass that kind of security? I'm guessing they're planning to either reverse engineer the stuff or resell them, reselling meaning many of the buyers will likely be connecting them to the network.
1 Like Sales recap:
Xbox 360 first month launch (2005) - 940,000 units
PS3 first month launch - (2006) 540,000 units.
Wii U first month launch - (2012) 1.8 million units
Wii first month launch - (2006) >2.2 million units.
Grow up trolls. Console is selling well, people are buying a shit load of them and are enjoying them, with great dedicated titles along the way. Get your head out of your a$$holes already.
Barely any great games coming on this console.. wrong choice to steal guys!Good thing the Wii has a large consumer base. Should make it easier to sell.
Hey, sometimes it isn't enough to play with one console. Sometimes you need 7000 to get the full experience.
They might have a hard times selling those at full price. If they sell them on EBay under multiple accounts, they might have a hard time getting caught.
There's a good chance this was an inside job. Especially if there were no locks or doors broken. The warehouse should have an alarm system I would think.
2 Like Congratulations boys, you just raked in 7000 wii u's, now to hand them out for free! ....oh wait...you were expecting people to pay for them? ....good luck with that
Yep,
Not a single individual out of this console's 1.8 million sales wants the system.
Or JUST maybe, it's only the 7 trolls here, in addition to the media critics being paid by Microsoft in the west.
Open your eyes children.
This is probably the same group of thugs that are string robbing chinatown in seattle. Fcking scumbags... we lost 10k they lost 2.1 mill =(
2 Like Hey at least those "Thieves" will have spare consoles once their Wii U is broke.
They must have had the perfect storm for this, because I can think of much better things to steal that would be much easier to get rid of, especially 7 thousand of them. Oh well, it's all profit for them, maybe, no matter how many they sell.
3 Like Serial numbers can be tracked once someone chooses to access the online features. After that, it's just following the trail. This isn't the 80's anymore where you can just fence the products and no one knows where it came from... Electronics that access the internet leaves trails...
Me and the boys can take care of your inventory issue and you'll get a nice fat insurance check.
1 Like @fanaticsm more like decreased by 7000..they didnt leave the money on the location were they steal the console you know...
@Imperiacommando @fanaticsm i Think He means the sales went up to make up for the lost Wii U's
2 Like No worries. They will probably get all 7,000 consoles back, since nobody wants a Wii U save for the diehard virgin fanboys who probably bought one at launch anyway.
1 Like i work in a warehouse and there is security during the night and the fact that it never closes. its up 24/7 and i would think this would be the same.. loading 64 pallets worth? that would have to take at least an hour just doing that. and he would probably have to be pretty good
When I saw this on the news, I was like "Dam, why wasn't I there? That Shipping depot is down the street from me". Those morons better be smart enough to not connect it online.
Hmm, wasn't it just a couple of months ago where some dudes stole 3600 IPad Minis from some airport?
1 Like really cheap Wii U consoles now available from your local back-alley shady seller...
Isn't each Wii U console uniquely identifiable? The biggest losers, besides Nintendo, maybe second hand resellers. Before these systems are recovered, all unofficial resellers are suspect. Good riddance.
@Unfallen_Satan I was thinking the same thing, they probably can figure out the range of serial numbers that are missing, since they stole them in large numbers like entire pallets. Considering it's a proprietary system that needs to connect to Nintendo's network to even play initially, these may not be usable. Then again maybe they really can't pin down the serials, who knows.
If they can be tracked, they will probably sell them off to some middle man(s), who will then sell them to some persons that will sell directly to the consumers, and some of those persons will be charged and/or forced to refund whether they knew the units were stolen or not.
That's my completely non-expert prediction :).
This seriously happened a few months back except it was somthing else, the robbers didnt get to take everything because an employee noticed them.
7 Like These guys are most likely professionals and knew what they were heisting. Storm was perfect cover.
4 Like @HIT3kNology Yeah man, this definitely ain't no amateur shit.....and if the authorities don't have no leads yet I'd say they didn't pretty damn good in cover their tracks just enough to buy them some time to distribute them out to where they wanted them to go, too
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