I just found out our garage had been broken into.

Most of what was taken was my VW Diecast collection (hotwheels, matchbox, Herbie, Cars, etc.) If anyone sees new ebay auctions, craigslists, etc around the southern NC area pop up...please keep an eye out. The cars were taken Monday 10/15 night.

Here's pictures before I had put them into tubs for storage. I had taken the photos to keep inventory. I've no clue where my inventory list is but I probably had 2-10 duplicates of each car. There were also dealer brochures for 1999-2003 VWs (Golf, Beetle, Passat, Eurovan)












These were all mis-packed and should be easy to spot:


Here's what just one of the tubs packed looked like. You can see how i had a bunch of duplicates of each car. I think there were about 10 tubs full of cars + the 2 big Herbie cars:


The Ridez cars behind the big remote (luckily i still play with that):


and all my Cars cars and McDonalds Cars cars:


:banghead: :banghead: :banghead: :banghead: :banghead:

If you see anything that stands out like mispacked car or someone on ebay that that just happens to have a new collection of Cars cars or Herbie cars (since those movies have been long over) pop up...it's worth looking into. Please call:

Wilmington Police Dept. (Hight, 2007-042152)
910-343-3600

Thanks for anyone that helps out.

Sorry to hear about that ahight , I will definitely keep an eye out for your collection. I’ll copy and save your pictures to my computer so when I visit eBay I can compare them.

Was that all that was stolen?

I'm sorry that happened. I hope that you reported this at lease. You've got a huge collection and I'm sure they're valuable. Do you have any clue on who may have stolen them?

no clue on who stole them. they also broke into our neighbors house and stole her TV and bike (with flat tires?) but they left my old GT Mountain Bike (probably because it didn't have a seat)....so i'm guessing these guys weren't professionals but probably typical NC trash looking to steal stuff to resell for booze.

I did report it, contact info is at end of first post. I'm going to print out the the photos and take it to local pawn shops and we live down from the Flea Market so Saturday morning we're going to check that out. I think that's all that was taken of our stuff.

When i sent the officer the email with photos and estimated value I came up with $1500. Since most of the collection is 3-5+ years old it's probably worth more than that now.

Well hopefully some evidence was left behind (Shoeprints, fingerprints, etc.)

Or drugs, and your right, most likely NC trash. A guy broke into my Ford Expedition at Targets one night (not the Expedition I have now, it was the one I had back in 1998) He broke into it to get my wife’s purse. An officer said the guy most likely stole it for money to buy drugs with. We had to cancel her credit cards as well.

But as I said above I will keep an eye out for anything suspicious.

Sad news
Will the insurance give you something for that? Or is it not insured?

it should be covered under Home Owners Insurance, but it's not worth the increase in rates to report it.

Today i'm going to make a page with the photos and add them to my neighborhood site then send the link to the newspaper and radio stations...I'm so pissed. I could barely get to sleep last night. When my partner put them in the garage I was complaining about them being in there because I was worried about the moisture damage to the cards that the MB and HW cars were on. Arrrgggg.

Sorry to hear that. I hope you catch those low-lifes.

Have you contacted die-cast collector clubs? They may have members in your vincinity that can also keep an eye open.

These links might help:
http://www.bamca.org/
http://www.matchboxclub.com/
http://toynutz.com/
http://matchbox.zsebehazy.com/
... and some link-lists:
http://www.faldix.de/index_eng.html
http://www.shabbir.com/matchbox/mbsites.html
http://modelcars.mbeck.ch/links.php?lang=e
http://www.modellautohomepage.de/linksa.htm

I will check the ebay pages, too. If your cars were sold to a clever crook, they might turn up on foreign ebay pages.

Alexander..thanks for the links. I'll give them a try. I have a feeling (after living down here for 2 years-but visiting for over 6) that it's local "trash" as I like to call them.

I'm going to spend lunch breaks this week driving around the neighborhood and adjoining neighborhoods to see if who ever took them are stupid enough to put the storage boxes out for trash or stupid enough to let their kid play with the RC cars in the street.

I just got finished emailing the link ( http://www.sunsetparknc.org/missingcollection.htm )of photos to the newspaper, radio stations, news channels, a couple auction houses and our neighborhood association.

I hate this feeling of getting more pissed off as the day goes on. I already went thru the stage where I checked all the windows in the house to make sure they were locked. But, like i told my coworker, it could have been worse. The whole fun part about the collection was collecting them, not the hope of reselling them for more than i paid for them.

My survivors!!

I found these on the floor around where the storage tubs were. I'm now calling them "My Survivors". They'll help me start my collection over. Some of them are my favorite ones. And I'm glad I found the Cars license plate...that one would be hard to replace unless the cereal company still has hundreds of them. And it looks like I still have 2 of my mispacked cars..yey!!! I'm trying to think positive inorder to make the rest of the day not so bad.

I'm glad that you got some of them back at lease. I wish you luck for the rest.

Great start to the weekend. I have more back. Got a call from someone that saw the flyers I've been handing out to local places and they gave me a call. Now the police think they know who did it and it's all about finding the rest.

The guy that we think did it is a crackhead so I doubt he's putting it on ebay or craigslist, so if it does show up it's people that bought it from him.

I'm so excited!!

Great ahight! I hope you find that crackhead.

me too. cop showed us his photo since we didn't see him steal it (since we couldn't id him in a line up). the lady got his id information - name and everything before she'd give him money for the toys.

Yey!!!

Nice! I am glad you’re starting to get some of your collection back, hopefully you will get all of it back and the A-hole who stole from you will be put on litter patrol.

ahight, have you gotten anymore news on the rest of your collection? (though I guess you would have said so if you did ... )

What a story i hadnt read it until today, if that would happen to my collection i surely die and as you say in case of things like this happen we dont miss the fact that we couldnt resale them for a higher prize we miss all the years missed collecting them all anyway i see you have been lucky and you may have found part of it right?
Notice us if theres a inprovment with it, good luck

That's a nice collection you've got there, glad you got it back. I wouldn't be happy if i lost my collection...

250+ 1:50 Scale cars
9 1:18 Cars
30+ 1:43 Scale cars

Mine is a pretty small collection compared to other members..

Except if I missed something, he just has a small part of it, no?