The internet’s favorite Lego conspiracy story (which, at this point, really isn’t even about Lego anymore) just had its strangest twist yet, as content creator Reckless Ben has recently announced that American Fork Police Department has allegedly been “hacked,” and inadvertently released what appears to be the unredacted footage of Ben’s encounters with the Utah-based police officers.
The last time we covered the ongoing feud between Lego resellers Bricks & Minifigs and Reckless Ben, American Fork police chief Cameron Paul had just released a video addressing Ben’s allegations against Joshua Johnson and Brandon Best; the two owners of the Oregon branch of Lego store Bricks & Minifigs, both of whom have been accused by Ben of stealing a $200,000 Lego Star Wars collection that was consigned to them by Bryan Mansell.
Well, actually, the last time we left the story was when Patreon’s CEO told Bricks & Minifigs to “stuff it” after the company asked Patreon to take down Reckless Ben’s content, but that part of the story isn’t immediately relevant. What is relevant, however, is Ben’s claim that American Fork’s police department are allegedly in cahoots with Johnson and Best, due to their alleged shared connections with the Mormon church in Utah.
In his latest video, which was released earlier this morning, Ben alleges that American Fork’s police department has been “hacked,” and the redacted audio from the second video in his $200,000 Lego investigation series has seemingly been leaked online as a result. Now, whether or not American Fork’s police department was actually hacked is a point of contention among Ben’s fanbase.
Here’s what we can confirm, though: According to a user on the r/recklessben subreddit, a folder titled “Unredacted Body & Dashcam” mysteriously popped up within the Dropbox link attached to the American Fork Police Department’s video “Bricks and Minifigs/Benjamin Schneider Media Release.” Based on the comments in the thread, somewhere between 52GB and 88GB of footage was contained within this folder.
So, yes, American Fork’s police department could have been hacked, but it could also have just been uploaded by mistake. Likewise, while the footage certainly looks compelling, based on what Kotaku was able to watch, two things are important to note here: It’s not 100-percent confirmed that the footage is real/unaltered, and, if it is real, it contains a lot of highly sensitive info, including home addresses and phone numbers, that most certainly makes sharing said footage a legal and moral minefield.
Well, they don’t call him “Reckless” Ben for nothing, as Ben has published a lot of the alleged footage in his most recent video. The piece of footage that Ben calls the most attention to is the allegedly unredacted footage of Joshua Johnson’s interaction with an American Fork officer, following Ben’s attempt to serve the Bricks & Minifigs store owner with legal papers. Now, if this is indeed real, I can see why this would upset Ben, as the footage appears to show Johnson asking to “take a peek” at the papers the American Fork officer is holding…which the officer seemingly stops Johnson from doing.
This matters because, per Utah’s state law, you have to physically serve someone with papers, which Ben couldn’t do as the people he was trying to serve kept dodging him. However, if the officer here would have let Johnson “take a peek,” that would have counted as him being served, so it appears as if the officer protected Johnson from being served by not letting him seeing the papers.
The American Fork Police Department has yet to officially respond to or verify the footage, but if it is real, I’d personally be extremely interested in finding out how exactly something like this made its way into the public’s hands. At best, I’d say the American Fork Police Department has a pretty serious data violation issue on their hands if this turns out to be legitimate.