Overview
- Irvine police arrested Jarrelle Augustine, 28, on Tuesday after surveillance tied him to repeated returns at Target stores in Irvine, Costa Mesa and Westminster.
- Investigators say he bought high-end LEGO kits, removed valuable minifigures and pieces, then resealed the boxes with dried pasta to mimic the weight and rattle of real bricks.
- Target and police linked roughly 70 incidents at stores nationwide, with about $34,000 in reported losses tied to the same suspect.
- Officers recovered sorted LEGO parts and multiple bags of pasta during the arrest and at his Los Angeles County apartment, and he was booked into the Orange County Jail on grand theft charges.
- Collectible LEGO parts are easy to resell and lack unique identifiers, which experts say makes this kind of return fraud hard to spot and encourages cross-state schemes.