It’s that time of year again. The birds are singing, the flowers are blooming, and apparently, criminals across Europe have decided that tax season is the ideal time to launch their own version of income redistribution. Why wait for a tax refund when you can access wealth in a much more daring, flaring way?
Let’s start in Italy, where four hooded thieves pulled off what may be the most efficient job anyone has completed this spring. On the night of March 22, they broke into the Magnani Rocca Foundation museum near Parma, grabbed three masterworks, a Renoir, a Cézanne, and a Matisse, and were back over the garden fence in under three minutes.1
Three. Minutes.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent more time than that trying to locate a client’s prior-year AGI. These thieves walked away with approximately $10.3 million in Impressionist paintings before most of us had finished reading the first page of a Schedule C. The museum, admirably committed to the element of surprise, didn’t even announce the theft publicly for a week, about the time it takes to finally get through to someone at the IRS.
Not to be outdone, a separate crew somewhere between Italy and Poland decided that fine art was so last week. Their target? A truck carrying 413,793 KitKat bars, a full 12 tons of chocolate, en route from a factory in Italy to distributors in Poland.2 The entire vehicle and its contents remain missing. KitKat, demonstrating the kind of crisis communications we can all aspire to, noted that thieves had "taken the message too literally and made a break" with their product.
A break. With a KitKat. Get it?
But the thieves may not have known one thing — that each KitKat bar has its own unique identifying number. KitKat has launched a stolen KitKat tracker on its website so you can report if you’ve got one of the stolen bars.3 Think of it as the sweetest identity theft tracker out there. So go dig into that bowl of chocolate bars in the breakroom (no pun intended) now and see if you can find one of those elusive Kit-Kat-napped bars.
