The weirdest heists in history after thieves’ brazen KitKat lorry raid

Not all heists have to be as dramatic or sexy as you’d think from watching Ocean’s Eleven, The Italian Job, or Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers.

After all, it’s not just gold and diamonds that are worth a lot of money – and other loot is an awful lot easier to steal.

Just look at the news this week. Thieves intercepted an astonishing 413,793 KitKat chocolate bars from a lorry travelling between the Nestlé factory in Perugia, Italy, and its destination in Poland.

In a surprisingly light-hearted statement given the circumstances, KitKat said they had ‘chosen to go public with our own experience in the hope that it raises awareness of an increasingly common criminal trend’.

Indeed, the grand theft choco might have tinkled a faint bell for people who have been reading the news over the past few years.

And when chocolate can sometimes be found in anti-theft boxes to stop shoplifters grabbing full shelves of the stuff, who is surprised?

@metrouk

You’d think crime would have a break this close to Easter… More than 400,000 KitKat bars have been stolen from a truck in Europe, Nestlé confirmed. A lorry carrying some 12 tons of the popular chocolate-covered wafer snack set out this week from the company’s factory in Perugia, central Italy. It was loaded with a total of 413,793 bars from the brand’s latest official Formula One range. #kitkat #chocolate #worldnews #news #chocolate

♬ original sound – Metro – Metro

Here are a few of the more eyebrow-raising examples of heists over the years.

Great Creme Egg robbery

It was a dark Easter in 2023, shortly after a trailer packed with 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs went missing from an industrial unit in Telford, Shropshire.

The culprit was 32-year-old Joby Pool from near Leeds, who had stolen a tractor the previous October to tow the trailer away in February.

According to BBC News, Pool drove the contraband north on the M42 before giving himself up to police.

That July, he was sentenced to 18 months with half to be spent in custody.

In for a nasty Surprise

Going further back to the late 2010s, there was a bizarre spate of vehicle cargo robberies in Germany.

In August 2017, thieves spirited away an entire semi-trailer packed with 20 tons of Nutella and Kinder Surprise eggs from the town of Neustadt – meaning they also got their grubby hands on thousands of fiddly build-your-own plastic toys.

That same weekend, another semi-trailer containing 30 tons of fruit juice was stolen more than 350 miles north in Wittenburg, a town near Hamburg.

But both paled in comparison to another theft in January 2018, when two truck trailers with 44 tons of chocolate were nicked from an industrial park in Freiburg.

Tough cheese

Heading across the Atlantic, a rare example of a weird heist with a happy ending.

Police in Marshfield, Wisconsin, were notified on January 15 2016 that wheels of parmesan cheese worth $90,000 had been stolen from a distributor.

A little under two weeks later, they received a tip-off that sent them in the direction of Grand Chute, south-west of Green Bay in the state, where they found the vanished cheese in a warehouse.

Unfortunately, another trailer with $70,000 worth of cheese had been stolen from Germantown, Wisconsin, in the meantime.

Gone whey too far

Closer to home, London cheese firm Neal’s Yard fell victim to dairy fraudsters in October 2024.

The business was contacted by people who claimed to be a wholesale distributor for a major retailer in France.

But it all turned out to be nonsense – leaving Neal’s Yard in the lurch for the cheesemakers who provided their product to fulfil the order.

The scale was pretty staggering: 950 wheels of cheddar were stolen in the fraud, weighing 22 tons and worth around £300,000.

Absent arthropods

The Philadelphia Insectarium and Butterfly Pavilion – now sadly closed – was the first bug zoo to open in the US.

That fact alone should have been enough to make it a source of national pride, but the museum’s notoriety instead stems to an incident in August 2018.

Insectarium boss Dr John Cambridge arrived one day to find the tanks and shelves completely empty. Someone had nicked thousands of his bugs – while they were alive.

The bizarre tale spawned a four-part TV documentary and bitter recriminations between the owner and his staff over who was to blame.

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