- You don’t mess with everyone’s favorite Australian dog.
Do you know Bluey? That’s a trick question — of course you do.
Even if you wouldn’t give a flying fluffernutter about cartoons for little kids, you can’t have missed seeing the blue dog somewhere. The Australian animated TV show has taken the world by storm, becoming more popular than anyone could’ve expected.
To celebrate the show’s tremendous success, the Australian Mint has released a commemorative AUS$1 coin. Its release, however, was marred by someone stealing the coins.
The thief didn’t pilfer just a handful of them, either. Put together, the stolen coins were worth more than AUS$600,000, which is roughly $400,000 in their U.S. equivalent.
The New South Wales Police Force (NSWPF) threw together an investigative force, giving it the hilariously dramatic name Strike Force Bandit. Yet, the strike force managed to locate the bandit and arrested a man who worked at a warehouse storing the coins.
However, the cops didn’t manage to recover all the stolen Bluey coins. Some had already been sold online — quite possibly to Bluey fans who weren’t aware they were purchasing stolen goods.
Praise Be to Bluey
Let’s start unwrapping this whole thing by explaining what Bluey is. Who knows, maybe some of you have lived in total isolation in a sound-proof chamber and have no idea what’s happened in the outside world in the last decade.
Bluey is an Australian kids’ animated TV show, which follows the life of the eponymous blue dog and her family. It premiered Down Under in 2018, but quickly exploded in popularity worldwide.
The show has received numerous awards and has been praised as quality entertainment for both children and their parents. Honestly, Bluey is probably the thing Australia is most famous for (apart from venomous animals).
As such, Australian authorities felt they needed to do something to celebrate the one Australian thing that’s not out to kill you. In June, the Australian Mint released a series of commemorative coins based on Bluey.
But that wasn’t enough. Now, the Mint is putting out one-dollar coins that are actual legal tender—with Bluey decorating one side of the coin.
An Innocent Buyer
The release of the coins hasn’t gone quite to plan, however. On July 12, the NSWPF received a report that someone had stolen currency from a warehouse in Wetherill Park, west of Sydney, more than two weeks earlier.
The currency in question was, of course, Bluey coins. Quite a significant number of them, in fact.
In total, 63,000 coins weighing more than 1,100 pounds had gone missing. As the one-dollar Bluey coins sell for 10 times their face value, the haul is worth roughly AUS$630,000, or around $400,000.
Now, this is a very serious crime as a slight against Bluey is a slight against the Australian nation. As such, the NSWPF put together a special task force to track down the coins.
This special squad was named Strike Force Bandit, after Bluey’s father from the show.
Soon enough, the cops noticed someone was trying to sell the unreleased coins online. A raid of the seller’s house on July 31 revealed that he was a legitimate coin collector who had “innocently” purchased the stolen Bluey coins.
Of course, he still couldn’t keep the coins, and the cops confiscated his 189 Bluey dollars.
The Bandit Strikes
The slighted collector, however, was able to point the cops in the direction of the person he bought the coins from. And he wasn’t the only one.
Although the Bluey coins’ theft went unnoticed for ages, online transaction records show they went up for sale mere hours after being stolen. Further investigations gave the cops an address of a house in Westmead, another Sydney neighborhood.
On August 7, the cops showed up at the house’s door with a search warrant. By the end of their visit, they had arrested a 47-year-old man.
According to the NSWPF, the man used to be a warehouse worker at the Wetherill Park Facility. They claim the arrested man, together with two other individuals, stole the Bluey coins from an Australian Mint truck on June 23.
They immediately began selling the coins online. Although the police confiscated what they could, some of the Bluey coins had already been sold.
As they are technically legal tender, it’s unclear how this incident will affect their planned official release in September. For the time being, the 47-year-old has been charged with three counts of breaking and entering with the intent to commit a serious indictable offense.
Meanwhile, Strike Force Bandit is continuing its investigation. You have to love that name.