BERLIN – Thieves relieved a British pleasure products manufacturer of sex toys valued at U.S. $60,000 as the company was preparing to leave the Venus trade show in Berlin. The victims are calling the crime “the largest sex-toy heist in history.”
“We had just celebrated the successful end of the Venus exhibition in Berlin to find out about a devastating accident at the trade show on Monday,” said Jack Romanski, founder of London-based Fun Toys. “When we arrived to load products into the truck … [i]t turned out that all of the Fun Toys products, worth over $60,000, had been stolen. Only the brochures, bags and two boxes with testers were left.”
The crooks did not make off with the awards the company won during the show, Romanski noted.
Adding insult to injury, the thieves struck again while a Fun Toys representative summoned police.
“When our representative Marco Tortoni was away for five minutes to meet the police at the entrance, another four boxes were stolen,” Romanski said.
“This is the largest recorded theft of sex toys in history,” he added. “What is amusing is that not a single tester went missing during the days of the exhibition.”
Romanski did not have kind words for the trade show’s staff.
“We can’t understand how the representative of Venus-Berlin could have been absent on the fairground on Monday,” he said. “Unfortunately, the managers organizing the exhibition were not helpful at all. We still have not received a record from video cameras or any other help in the course of investigation. The representative of Venus-Berlin did not show up at the scene after the accident.
“The only thing we managed to receive from the organizers on the next day is the contacts of the contractor who set up the stand,” he said.
Romanski said he believes the thieves may try to sell the products and asked store owners and others who may come into contact with unauthorized resellers to inform the authorities. A list of the company’s authorized distributors is here.
Images courtesy of Jack Romanski.
