The $200,000 LEGO Scandal Got Way Worse

[00:00:00]Reckless Ben spent months building what was supposed to be the biggest video series of his career. And now he says uploading it would send him to jail. On June 9th, Ben posted a video to his channel titled My Final Message. It runs 1 minute and 42 seconds. And in it, he tells his audience that episode 3 of his Lego investigation is completely finished after what he describes as crazy all nighters and basically destroying my health. He drops a bombshell, >> but I can't post it or I will go to jail.

[00:00:31]>> According to Ben, he is not even allowed to mention the company at the center of the story, which he now refers to only as this mysterious company. And the consequences he describes goes beyond the video itself. In his words, posting episode 3 means, >> "I will also immediately lose my lawsuit of $300,000, and the GoFundMe we made for Brian will go straight to this mystery company." That GoFundMe is its own problem. The fundraiser set up to help Brian Menel recover the value of his elderly father's Star Wars Lego collection had climbed to $450,000.

[00:01:06]But if you visit the page today, you won't see a total, a donor list, or even an update. You'll see GoFundMe's generic page not found screen. Nearly half a million dollars raised by hundreds of thousands of viewers now sits behind a dead link. And the one person who claims to know why says he'll go to jail if he explains it, which means this story has mutated into something much stranger than where it started. Real quick, the future me here, the GoFundMe website was since reinstated. However, whether the money raised actually goes to Brian is still in question, and you'll find out why. What's begun as a question about a missing Lego collection is now a situation where the third video in the series cannot legally be uploaded. The fundraiser has vanished from public view, and the company being investigated is wielding a RICO lawsuit and a court-ordered restraining order against the people talking about it. To be clear, almost everything here is still an allegation. Ben claims he's being silenced. The company claims it's being defamed and threatened. A judge has signed an order, but no court has ruled on who is actually telling the truth.

[00:02:11]And if the corruption in Utah is as bad as it seems, we might never even find out the truth. What can be said with confidence is this. The company's attempt to make this story go away has involved a restraining order before Ben could argue his side, a lawsuit normally associated with organized crime, and a vanished fundraiser. And every one of those moves has made the story bigger.

[00:02:33]This is everything that happened after part two and how a dispute over plastic bricks ended up testing what a company can legally do to stop a YouTuber from talking. Hi, I'm the internet anarchist.

[00:02:44]I create weekly YouTube documentaries and today we're diving back into the reckless Benverse bricks and minifig situation. If you missed the last video, here's a 30-cond version. Brian Mancel was helping his father sell his Lego Star Wars collection valued at around $200,000.

[00:03:00]It went on consignment at a bricks and minifig store in Oregon. Then the store changed hands, and when Brian came back for the collection, most of it was gone.

[00:03:09]YouTuber Reckless Ben picked up the story and turned it into a two-part investigation that pulled in millions of views and made Bricks and Minigs the most hated Lego brand on the internet.

[00:03:20]The last video covered the fallout, Ben's arrest, and the police controversy that followed, the company's first public statements denying responsibility and its failed attempt to get Ben's content pulled from Patreon. At the time, it looked like the company was losing the internet fight, so it stopped fighting on the internet and took the fight into a courtroom. The document that silenced Ben is a temporary restraining order signed on May 28th by Judge Tony Fgraph Jr. in Utah's fourth judicial district court. The original document isn't on a public court portal, but a mirrored copy of the filing has been circulating online, and the details inside it explain almost everything about Ben's final message. Speaking of legal matters, you may be entitled to a potential recovery of over $1,000.

[00:04:06]Recently, a jury ordered Meta and YouTube to pay millions for their role in designing and promoting addictive platforms. They knew their apps could contribute to anxiety, depression, and body image issues, but did not share those risks while prioritizing profits.

[00:04:20]The recent history verdict underscores the consequences of those decisions. If you or your child spent years growing up on social media and experienced serious mental health struggles, you should hear this. Morgan and Morgan is stepping up to hold these platforms accountable for the harm they caused. You can use my link in the description or scan the QR code on screen to take a short quiz to see if you qualify for the case. With that being said, let's get right back into the video. The first detail is how the order was granted. The filing says the matter came before the court on the plaintiff's exparte motion for temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction. Exparte is a legal term that means exactly what it sounds like it shouldn't. One side showed up, told the judge their version of events and got the order before Ben presented his side at that stage. Ben put it more bluntly in his video.

[00:05:09]>> I was not given a chance to share my side. The court just heard their perspective, not mine.

[00:05:14]>> That's a normal mechanism for genuine emergencies. Whether this qualified as one is now the entire argument. Then there's what the order actually restricts. Some of it is the kind of thing nobody would defend. No making or facilitating death threats, bomb threats, or physical threats of harm. No doxing the plaintiffs or their staff. No coming within 1,000 yards of company locations or homes after being put on notice. No impersonating people. No fake contracts or fake courts documents. and no signs implying the plaintiff stole from elderly people or closed down to dodge a judgment. If that were the whole order, this would be a very different video, but it keeps going. The order also bans creating or reposting false, misleading, harassing, interfering, defamatory, or unlawful content about the plaintiffs and requires the publications relating to the dispute to be immediately removed and or taken down from online platforms. That last clause is the direct reason episode 3 cannot be uploaded. And according to Kotaku, it reaches backwards, too. Meaning even Ben's previous videos may have to come down. In other words, a judge ordered the investigation that tens of millions of people watched to be erased before any court has decided whether a single claim in it was false. One more detail from the filing, the court required no bond from the company, finding the defendant would suffer no legitimate harm from being restrained. Ben would presumably point at his finished unpostable episode and disagree. The restraining order is temporary by definition with a preliminary injunction hearing meant to follow and the mirrored copy shows the hearing date should be on the 22nd of June. So, the clock that decides whether this silence becomes semi-permanent hasn't even been set. and the company that obtained the order, Bricks and Minigs, is only getting started because the restraining order was just the opening move of a much bigger lawsuit. The most explosive claim in Ben's final message is his explanation of how the company convinced a judge to silence him in the first place. In his words, "This order was put on me because this company was telling the court that I was making bomb threats. I was planning on murdering the the manager and employees, which obviously I didn't do.

[00:07:30]>> If that sounds insane for a story about secondhand Lego, the company's actual court filing is worth reading carefully because what it alleges is both less and more damning than Ben makes it sound.

[00:07:42]The complaint does not claim Ben personally wrote a bomb threat. What it alleges is that after his videos went up, the defendants directly or indirectly solicited, incited, and or caused the company and its franchises to receive death and bomb threats. As evidence, it attaches examples of threatening emails received on May 21st, including one that reads, "I will be mailing you guys some explosive Lego sets, super hot items about to go boom."

[00:08:08]So, the company's theory isn't that Ben sent the threats. It's that his videos acted as a delivery system for the people who did. To be fair to everyone here, those threats appear to be real.

[00:08:18]They were sent to real employees and nobody should be receiving them over a Lego dispute. Ben denies making or planning anything of the sort, and no court has found that he has encouraged anyone to do so. But the legal significance of this framing is hard to overstate. A judge reading a complaint about a defamation dispute sees a speech case. And speech cases come with constitutional alarm bells. A judge reading about bomb threats, murder plots, and frightened employees sees a safety case. And safety cases get emergency orders. Whether intentional or not, the threat allegations transformed Ben from a YouTuber with a camera into a threat that needed restraining. In a hearing where he wasn't present to argue the difference, which is why Ben's other line from the video matters so much.

[00:09:04]>> I was not given a chance to share my side, the court just heard their perspective, not mine.

[00:09:09]>> The first time Ben got to respond to the claim that he was planning murders was after the order based on that claim had already silenced him. And the lawsuit attached to that order showed the company wasn't trying to just restrain him. It was trying to take everything he'd built. The restraining order is just one piece of the lawsuit that shows how completely the company abandoned its PR strategy. In late May, Bricks and Minifigs franchising, its executives Aman and Matthew McNeff, the Salem store operators Joshua Johnson and Brandon Best, and an entity called Baker Bricks filed a suit in Utah County against Ben, his company Reckless Ben LLC, Brian Mansel, Ben's associate, Victor Newan, and 15 unnamed defendants. Read that defend list again. The company isn't just suing the YouTuber. It's suing the man who just wanted to get his family's Lego sets back. Brian Mancel. The headline accusation that has been blowing up all over the internet is racketeering. The complaint's first count is brought under Utah's Rico statute. The kind of law written for organized crime, alleging that a YouTuber, his cameraman, and a man trying to recover his father's Lego collection formed an enterprise engaged in a pattern of unlawful activity. From there, the complaint stacks up 12 more counts. Defamation, injurious falsehood, civil conspiracy, tortious interference, civil stalking, nuisance, trespass, intentional infliction of emotional distress, unjust enrichment, declaratory relief, and injunctive relief. 13 claims aimed at every video, stunt, sign, and social post of the past several months.

[00:10:45]But the count list isn't the scary part.

[00:10:48]The scary part is what the company is asking for. Beyond the damages and attorney fees, the complaint demands an accounting and discordment of essentially every dollar the campaign has ever generated. YouTube ad revenue, Patreon income, merch sales, sponsorships, podcast and website revenue, and the GoFundMe money. This is the mystery company math from Ben's final message. When he says the fundraiser will go straight to this mystery company, he's describing what happens if Bam wins this claim. The $450,000 raised for Brian could legally be redirected to the business accused of losing his collection in the first place. It's worth being honest about both sides here because the most credible people outside of the commentary community refused to pick a team. Tech's Mike Masnik, who has spent decades covering exactly these kinds of speech disputes, wrote that a lot of people should have spoken to competent lawyers before doing what they did and that Ben's approach to going viral is not a legal strategy. stunts, signs, and showing up at people's homes handed Bam real claims to work with. But the same analysis describes Bam's conduct as looking very, very, very sketchy and calls the company's claim that it had no notice of Brian's consignment plainly since circulating video allegedly shows the previous owner explaining that exact liability during the handover. In Tech Dirt's reading, this is not a story with a competent side. And less than a week after filing a lawsuit defending the Salem store's operators, the company did something that made everyone reread the complaint.

[00:12:21]It cut them off. On June 4th, a press release went out over Business Wire with a headline, "Nobody following this story expected." Bricks and Minigs parts ways with Salem, Oregon franchise owners Brandon Best and Joshua Johnson. The company announced the permanent closure of the Salem store and what it carefully described as a mutual agreement to part ways with Brandon Best and Joshua Johnson. The same two men listed as plaintiffs on the RICO lawsuit the week before. To be precise about what this is and isn't a mutual separation is not an admission of theft, and BAM admitted no wrongdoing by anyone. But after months of insisting the internet had the story wrong, the company had now permanently erased the store the story was about and removed the owners at the center of it.

[00:13:07]The same announcement contained an even bigger reversal. Bam said it remained willing to sit down with Brian directly.

[00:13:14]It offered to hand over whatever Star Wars Lego was or remains in the Salem store, whether you identify as yours or not. And according to Ko's reporting, the company was even prepared to discuss removing Brian from its own lawsuit.

[00:13:27]Let's just think about that for a second. This is the company that sued Brian for racketeering, now publicly offering to compensate him, give him the Lego, and possibly drop him from the case 6 days after filing it. Bam prepared the Olive Branch with a counternarrative about the numbers. The company now claims the collection was never worth $200,000, putting its value at roughly 95K to 100K, and says the point of sales data shows more than $52,000 in sales that may match Brian's items during the previous owner's tenure, implying Brian was paid or owed far less than the viral figure suggests, which leaves the obvious question hanging over the whole announcement. If the company's position was that this was always a private dispute it bore no responsibility for, why does the endgame look exactly like what Ben's videos demanded? The store gone, the operators out, and an offer to make Brian whole. Nerd Break put it best. The location at the center of the consignment fight is now shut. The dispute outlived the store. Bam gave the internet nearly everything it had been screaming for, while still suing the people who did the screaming. And days later, a court filing from the store's previous owner surfaced a document that made the company's public statements look even worse. In BAM's June 4th statement, there's one sentence that has now come back to bite them. The company wrote, "Consignment sales have never been a part of the BAM model. The franchise agreement or the operations manual." In other words, consignment was never our thing. It's not in our contracts. Never has been. There's just one problem. The contract says otherwise. Crystal Law, the previous owner of the Salem store, is suing BAM.

[00:15:06]And attached to her lawsuit is a copy of the actual franchise agreement. The contract between BAM and its store owners. In the list of services a store can offer, it says this. Franchises may also offer consignment services. So, the company said consignment was never in the franchise agreement. Then, their own franchise agreement showed up in court, and it says consignment right there in black and white. Now, one piece of fairness before anyone declares the case over. The contract also says these services need the company's approval.

[00:15:37]So, this doesn't prove that BAM approved Brian's deal, and it doesn't automatically make them responsible for his collection. But that's not what Bam said. They didn't say this deal wasn't approved. They said consignment was never in the agreement at all. And that just doesn't appear to be true. Crystal Law's lawsuit goes much further than one contract page. She and her partner say that back in November 2024, BAM suddenly terminated their franchise, changed the locks, and took the store and everything inside it. As she put it, "Our lives were turned upside down when the corporate franchiser behind our bricks and miniig store abruptly seized our business, changed the locks, confiscated our inventory, and publicly accused us of theft. And if that's true, it matters. It would mean that when Brian's collection went missing, the people in control of the store and everything in it weren't the local owners. It was Bricks and Miniigs corporate. To be clear, these are her accusations, not proven facts. And Bam disputes them. But look at where the company now stands.

[00:16:38]Its public defense is contradicted by its own contract. Its own former store owner is suing it, and the store itself is gone. Meanwhile, the one person who can't say anything about it is the YouTuber who started asking questions.

[00:16:52]And the lawsuit isn't even Ben's only legal problem. While all of this was happening, he was also facing criminal charges in Utah. These came out from the stunts from his part two video.

[00:17:02]According to local reports, Ben is charged with four misdemeanors: stalking, targeted residential picketing, disorderly conduct, and criminal trespass. not felonies, but real charges in a real criminal court with jail time on the table if things go badly. The police version of events goes like this. They say Ben kept coming back to the franchisee Joshua Johnson's home, sent other people to knock on the door and deliver packages, took photos of the house, and planted a sign outside that read, "I stole a dying man's life savings." Police say Ben admitted the sign was meant to get Joshua Johnson to come outside. Remember, this is the police account written to justify the charges. It's not the verdict. Ben tells it differently. He says he wasn't stalking anyone. He was serving legal papers and investigating the story. When the local police chief put out a 26-minute statement defending the arrests, Ben fired back with a point-by-point rebuttal disputing the reason for the original traffic stop and the way the searches were handled. And he has one fact that's hard to argue with. When police searched his Airbnb with a warrant looking for stolen Lego, they found nothing. No stolen items were found and none were seized. The case is still active and Ben hasn't entered a plea as of the latest reports. A protective order was granted against him in May and a court date came and went on June 8th with no public word of what happened. So, picture Ben's position right now. a lawsuit that could take every dollar he's earned, a court order that bans him from posting, and a criminal case that could put him in jail, the same jail he keeps mentioning in his videos. That's the backdrop for the question that the whole saga now comes down to. What is this story actually about anymore? Because here's the thing, this stopped being one story a long time ago. It's now three fights happening at the same time. The first fight is the original one, and it's easy to forget it's still unanswered. What actually happened to Brian's collection?

[00:18:56]How much was it really worth? How much is he still owed? And who has to pay him? The old store owners, the new ones, or the company itself? After two viral videos, multiple lawsuits, and months of chaos, nobody has actually answered the question that started all of this. The second fight is about what BAM is really doing. Read their June 4th statement one way, and it's a company finally cleaning up its mess. store closed, owners gone, and an open offer to make Brian whole.

[00:19:23]Read it the other way, and it's a company solving its PR problem while its lawyers solve everyone else. Because the lawsuit doesn't say, "We made mistakes."

[00:19:32]It says the backlash itself was the crime. Either the internet was wrong about you or you just shut down the store the internet was right about. The third fight is the one that affects more than just these people. Where's the line? Ben didn't just make videos. He showed up at homes, planted signs, and sent people to knock on doors. At some point, a YouTube investigation can turn into harassment, and a court may decide Ben crossed that line. But the company's answer wasn't to sue over the stunts. It was to get an order that erases the videos, too. And at some point, a company defending itself turns into a company silencing criticism. It's entirely possible both lines were crossed in the same story. TechDirt's take captures the mess on both sides.

[00:20:16]Going viral, as Masnik wrote, is not a legal strategy, and Ben's stunts handed Bam the best ammunition. But he also points out why people like Brian end up turning to YouTubers in the first place.

[00:20:28]There's a dead zone in the legal system where a dispute is too big for small claims court and too expensive for a normal person to litigate. Brian's collection sat right in that dead zone.

[00:20:39]The courts had no easy door for him. Ben was the door he found. So, here's where everything stands. Episode 3 is finished, but locked away. The restraining order is in force. The Rico lawsuit is active. The Salem store is permanently closed. Its owners are gone.

[00:20:54]And Bam is now offering to make Brian whole while still suing him and still trying to claw back every dollar the video's ever made. And since I recorded this video, two important things changed. First, the GoFundMe was restored. So, it's no longer just a dead link. The question is where that money ultimately goes. whether Brian actually receives it or whether it gets pulled into the legal battle as Ben warned.

[00:21:18]Second, Coffeezilla uploaded his own investigation and it adds a whole new layer to the situation. Coffeezilla went through photos, videos, store records, and interviews with people on both sides. And his conclusion was basically that the situation was a lot more complex than simply $200,000 of Legos going missing. According to Coffeezilla's breakdown, there appears to have been far more of Brian's Lego in the store on the handover night than Bam initially suggested. Bam's public statement talked about only $2,000 to $5,000 worth of potentially related sets. Coffeezilla says he found roughly $21,000 worth that could be matched from the photos and videos, which is obviously a very different number. We looked through over 200 plus photos, multiple videos, and matched what we saw with Brian's collection. In the end, I ended up with about $21,000 of Legos matching Brian's collection that can be proven to be in the store on the night of November 14th. Now, to state the obvious, that's about three to five times what corporate estimated, at least on their press release. But he also found reasons the full $200,000 figure may not represent what was actually missing from the store that night. Some of the collection may have been sold, some may have been in layaway, and some may have been part of separate storage or involved in side deals. His estimate was that the unexplained missing Legos might be closer to $10 to $20,000 worth, while Brian may still be owed something more like $50 to $83,000 overall. The biggest moment was when the bricks and minifigures side appeared to say they never got Brian's spreadsheet only for Coffeezilla to point out that the file appeared to be owned by a Bricks and Minigs account >> or we asked for it.

[00:23:06]>> It says it's I I'm just I'm so confused.

[00:23:08]It says I I'm on the I'm on the file right now. It says storage used owned by BAM Franchising Inc. owner Salem.org bricksand minifigs.com.

[00:23:19]>> What What are you looking at?

[00:23:20]>> It says owner Salem dot O R at bricksand minifigs.com that's you guys says owned by BAM Franchising Inc.

[00:23:30]says created September 6th 2024 and when I look at it this is the the manel uh list I believe so this this would have been created under like so so we we have the um we >> y'all definitely have this y'all have access to this. Well, I had no idea like so if this is the first anybody has shown me that >> that a spreadsheet was created using like bricks and minifigs Salem like and all of this stuff was archived. This this is the first I've seen that this spreadsheet was created by Crystal and we don't know how accurate it is, how up up to date it was. We don't know a lot of those types of things and and and understand I appreciate you sharing this with us because we had no idea. Again, you don't know what you don't know. And that's only just one reason why people on the internet are now saying that there are obvious lies or at least obvious contradictions in Bam's new story. For starters, they kept changing stories when explaining the U-Haul truck. The $2,000 to $5,000 number is clearly They claimed not to do consignment despite it being part of the franchise agreement. And now they're trying to plead ignorance, but tripping over their own lies. What happens next is out of everyone's hands but the courts. A judge will decide whether the gag order becomes long-term. That decides whether episode 3 ever exists in public. And somewhere in the process, we'll learn whether GoFundMe money actually goes, whether Brian takes the deal, and whether Ben walks away from his criminal charges or into a cell. And don't expect a satisfying ending. Almost everything about this story is now inside a courtroom where things move slowly and nobody is allowed to talk. If you want to stay updated on this situation, make sure you subscribe with notifications on. Click the video on screen to watch