Lobster Heist Nets Nearly Half a Million Dollars of Stolen Seafood

When we think of heists, a few likely targets come to mind: large amounts of money or valuable objects like art and jewelery. Think Ocean’s 11, Lupin or The Mastermind — big-ticket items that can be easily resold and transported out of their rightful home. But these aren’t the only things that can be stolen; recent years have also seen things like caviar and maple syrup be the targets of heists. And now, you can add lobster to the roster of food heist targets.

$400,000 worth of lobster, to be precise. According to an NBC News report from Matt Lavietes and Anna Sundberg, a seafood thief is believed to have impersonated a legitimate delivery driver, and then made off with almost half a million dollars’ worth of lobster intended for Costco locations in Illinois and Minnesota.

According to Rexing Companies president Dylan Rexing, this crustacean heist was not an outlier; instead, it’s part of what he has observed to be a growing trend. “It followed a pattern we’re seeing more and more, where criminals impersonate legitimate carriers using spoofed emails and burner phones to hijack high-value freight while it’s in transit,” Rexing told NBC News.

A high-stakes lobster heist might not have the same thrill ride value as, say, one of the highway chase scenes from The Fast and the Furious, but presumably there’s a black market out there for illegal lobster.

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The thieves intended to steal more than that

There is one more interesting wrinkle to this story: NBC News reports that the lobsters that were stolen “were not alive.” Given that lobster are generally sold alive, how long of a shelf life does this stolen shipment have before it turns rancid? According to the website of Pine Tree Seafood & Produce Co., “dead lobster can be consumed safely up to 24 hours from time of death, if refrigerated properly at or below 38°F.”

However, a number of online retailers also offer flash-frozen lobster meat, suggesting that the purloined lobster in this case could stay intact as long as it remains below freezing. Whether the lobster thieves can accomplish this will go a long way towards determining if this heist goes down in history as a success — or a catastrophic (and, presumably, very smelly) event for all involved.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…