Playdate Podcast

Cabel Sasser: You know, we don’t—we don’t wanna cause any trouble. And our motivation was always: we just want these back, like, we need to sell these. They cost money. So the goal was simply “Operation Recover Playdates.” Uh, I almost said “by any means possible,” but no, not by any means possible. In a way that is safe and non-dangerous and doesn’t hurt anybody.

Christa Mrgan: Welcome to the Playdate Podcast, bringing you stories from game developers, designers, and the team behind Playdate,

the little yellow game console with a crank. I’m Christa Mrgan. And today, I’m bringing you a very special, True Crime Edition of the podcast,

involving a Circle K, a family crime ring, and $400,000 worth of missing Playdates.

. Buckle up because we are going for a ride— in Magnum P.I.'s cool car.

Cabel Sasser: Wait, I’m getting it a little bit backwards, but you can cut it together in the right form.

Kyle Rimkus: This is really hard to get the timeline straight; one, because it’s been a while, but also because so much happened there.

Jennifer Lieb: So I should go back to the beginning.

Cabel Sasser: My name is Cabel Sasser and I am a Co-founder here at Panic. And before we begin, I wondered if it would be helpful to you if I just gave you a series of me saying the word “allegedly,” so you could copy and paste it at various parts of the thing, so we don’t get in any legal trouble.

So I’m just gonna do a few. Okay. Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. Okay.

So here’s the story, as I understand it: many months into this year. Well, a couple months into this year, there’s some chatter around the office. I see like Greg talking to Jen, kind of in a hushed whispered tone.

And I’m wondering what’s going on. What, what could be happening right now? And eventually either Greg or Jen explains to me that they’re looking at the inventory of Playdates and we are way short. That we know what the factory has shipped to us and what’s sitting at our fulfillment warehouse

is not the right number of Playdates, and that is how this whole thing started.

Jennifer Lieb: 3PL is “third party logistics.” It’s basically where you keep all your inventory and it ships out to customers.

My name is Jennifer Leib and I’m the Controller for Panic.

So we switched 3PLs—warehouses—in October of 2023, because our other warehouse got bought

by a large shipping company, and they didn’t want small accounts. So we did a lot of research and we picked a new one in North Las Vegas, and we started shipping Playdates there.

And the first shipment came from Malaysia,

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, the factory that makes Playdates is in Malaysia. They ship devices in batches to our 3PL provider, a company called Ship Fusion.

Jennifer Lieb: And there was two sets of two pallets that came within a week apart of each other. So we had a bunch of inventory all at once.

Kyle Rimkus: We switched warehouses and they have a different portal and the inventory isn’t included in a really straightforward way. There’s multiple phases to it.

My name is Kyle. I’m a software developer, and I also built the integrations with our fulfillment system. So I have data on how shipments were sent and where Playdates are and how they get registered and, and all that information.

And so the numbers were never really adding up as we sent multiple pallets to the warehouse. We assumed that those numbers would shake out eventually, and when they didn’t, we started looking into why. And we realized that the very first shipment that was supposed to arrive never arrived.

Jennifer Lieb: It was a mess. End of January, early February, I was reconciling inventory for year end and thought, “wow, we’re missing like 2000 units. What’s going on?” And so I talked to a few people here at Panic. We went back and forth. I went through all the tracking numbers.

I looked at Ship Fusion’s backend and I basically figured out that one of the tracking numbers never made it, but it said it made it. It said it was delivered. That put us down a path of talking to Ship Fusion for a couple weeks. They were super helpful and they basically said, “no, we’ve never received that. We have no record of it.” Even though FedEx had a proof of delivery. It was just a piece of paper showing who signed for it. And it was a name we didn’t recognize, and it was a name Ship Fusion didn’t recognize.

We know from experience here at Panic’s office, often when we get deliveries, and not just from FedEx but from multiple delivery partners, they don’t actually ask your name, they just click whatever the last name was that signed the prior delivery. And so Ship Fusion’s response was, you know, “that’s kind of normal.” And so who knows, kind of signed for it. And FedEx didn’t have any like geographical tracking of like where they dropped it, or a picture. I mean, even Amazon takes pictures. So that was kind of frustrating.

Cabel Sasser: At first we’re like, did FedEx lose them? The answer to that is yes, but not in the way that we expected.

Jennifer Lieb: So we were probably towards the end of February at this point, and we were just kind of scratching our heads. And then on one of our calls with Ship Fusion,

Cabel Sasser: we hear from our fulfillment warehouse that, "Hey, you know, there was a weird situation that we didn’t tell you about,

where a month or so ago we got a call from this construction site next door." They’re building a Circle K— you know, it’s got the snacks and the drinks. Why am I explaining what a Circle K is? They’re building a Circle K. And the construction team is like, “Oh, hey, there’s a couple pallets of these things that we think are for you.” Now, it is not a mystery who they are for. There is a very big sticker that says the name of our fulfillment warehouse, which is directly next door to the Circle K. It was very clearly misdelivered, but they alerted our shipping warehouse, which was very thoughtful of them.

Jennifer Lieb: The Ship Fusion facility has like 20 loading docks on the backside.

Like it’s obvious where shipping providers should be leaving goods. Luckily, and I am so thankful, they took photos. Where the pallets were with the construction guys, very clearly showing like this did not make it to the loading dock. So Ship Fusion went out, they took photos, they brought the units back into their building, and rightfully so, thought, “okay, cool, like, we got the units. you know, FedEx did a, bad delivery. It happens.” They didn’t know we were missing units from 10 days before, so they would’ve never known that something was a bit askew.

I called FedEx back and said, well, now I have photos. I explained the whole narrative. I actually typed up a whole narrative, and again, they said, "oh, well, we delivered it. We have proof of delivery."

Cabel Sasser: And, that is when this got a lot more interesting because the tracking information for the units that were missing was signed for by someone with the same name as the person that signed for the ones at the construction site.

Jennifer Lieb: So on the call, we all kind of paused and said, "wait, what?"

Cabel Sasser: And that’s when we went, “oh no, this maybe happened twice! Maybe FedEx delivered a chunk to the construction site and those kind of went somewhere and then they made the same mistake again and the construction site was like, " Oh, crap. We’d better tell 'em about this.” So, we had this idea in our minds that maybe the first shipment disappeared in a unsavory way. “Unsavory?”

You know, we love a good mystery challenge here at Panic, and we love a good side quest, as I’m sure listeners of this podcast understand by now.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, it’s kind of a recurring theme!

Cabel Sasser: And man, this was a tantalizing one. We have a lot of data and a lot of information. And we have the internet at our disposal. So one thing that’s important to note is that we know every Playdate that’s being shipped from the factory. We know the serial numbers of every Playdate, and we know what’s on a pallet when a pallet of Playdates is generated.

We know the units that are on that pallet. And Kyle, who’s the master of all Playdate shipping information, knew exactly which serial numbers were missing.

Kyle Rimkus: We don’t track individual Playdates until they are registered by a user, but we do know how those Playdates are packaged and what cartons they are included in. And so I went back and looked at the history of the cartons, and it was very clear we were missing 48 cartons.

Cabel Sasser: When he looked at it a little more closely, he realized that seven of these supposedly missing Playdates had been activated and registered by people. How is that possible? How can this be?

Kyle Rimkus: At that point, the open question was did these get somehow included in our stock at our warehouse and sent out to legitimate customers?

Jennifer Lieb: It was really weird. And why only seven? We kept asking this question, where are the rest of the units? Why aren’t they being registered?

Kyle Rimkus: So I started to look into who registered those seven devices. We don’t track very much information from our customers. You know, we err on the side of privacy. We don’t track IP addresses of a lot of requests or anything. But one thing that we have to track is the email address of the person who registered a device 'cause they do that via an account on our website.

Jennifer Lieb: You can learn so much from an email address.

Cabel Sasser: And the first thing we noticed is that the people that registered those units were all residing in North Las Vegas, where our warehouse is.

And so that was the first, "hmm." And then we started to look at the names and how those correlate and LinkedIn and "Hmm, maybe that person was an employee of a construction company." And the big wall corkboard of red string just began to grow. And this whole picture sort of formed in our minds of what might have actually happened here.

We started to build our own sort of dossier, which makes it sound way cooler than it really is. A, a slack chat, let’s call it that instead, and started to piece together maybe who some of these people were.

Kyle Rimkus: We thought, well, you know, this was a construction site next to a busy road. Surely nobody at the construction site’s involved. it would come back to them too easily.

Cabel Sasser: I reached out to the construction company because our fulfillment warehouse knew the name of the construction company. I contacted them and I said, Hey, we’re trying to find this lost shipment that for some stupid, sorry, FedEx. For some stupid reason, FedEx dropped off at this place. Why am I apologizing to FedEx? It’s their fault. Okay, anyways so I reached out to the guy that runs the construction company and he wrote back and he’s like, “oh, that work was actually done by this other construction company.”

And the GC, the super in charge of that project was named this. And the name very closely matched the name of the person that signed for the delivery. And to me that was like, okay we know what happened here. FedEx went, " Hey, somebody want this electronic stuff that I’m willing to drop in the desert for some reason?" and they just slapped it down on the ground and it was just too tempting and too tantalizing, and they flew away to someone’s house, garage. I don’t know. We, I dunno that we know!

So then we’re like, “we have a lot of information here. We have leads and suspects and names of people, and you know, what do we do now?”

Jennifer Lieb: We had lots of conversations internally about what to do next. Do we go to Vegas and just knock on doors?

Cabel Sasser: The first thing actually we did was file a police report.

Christa Mrgan: Well, tried to file a police report.

Jennifer Lieb: We kept trying to file it online and it kept getting rejected. It’s this online form. You’d think it’d be super simple, right? You open the form, you put in all your details.

You say what happened. You hit submit. Someone there looks at it says, “oh yeah, this makes perfect sense.” Accepts it and like you get an email saying, “Hey, this is your police report number. This is the officer assigned, blah, blah, blah.” That’s not how it actually works. So, we filled out the form-- both Cabel and I actually filled it out separately, because when I filled it out the first time, it got rejected and I thought, what did I do wrong?

And so Cabel tried it because, hey, he’s definitely a better writer than I am, so let’s see if that helps. And his got rejected, too, so I felt actually a little bit better.

So I called the North Las Vegas Police Department multiple times, both before I submitted the report, after mine got rejected, after Cabel’s got rejected.

And they just kept saying, “well, yeah, you know, you can do it online, but it’s just so much easier if you come in.”

So we were probably in the third week of March and Kyle and I looked at each other and we’re like, " We need to go to Vegas."

We needed to go visit Ship Fusion anyways. 'cause usually you go see the 3PL early on and we just hadn’t 'cause of the holidays.

Kyle Rimkus: It’s nice to just kind of understand the lay of the land there, and meet people in person and understand what it means when we make requests of our warehouse, that sort of thing. So we thought, alright, well why don’t we go down there and meet the warehouse get a tour. And also go by the police department and submit a report. So that’s what we did. Jen and I went to Las Vegas.

Jennifer Lieb: The other catalyst to this was an eighth unit got registered, probably early March.

Christa Mrgan: Aha! An eighth unit. And that one turned out to be pretty important in connecting the dots, as you’ll see eventually. But for now, Las Vegas. Or technically, North Las Vegas.

Jennifer Lieb: And so we’re thinking maybe we can go, maybe we can like suss out physically what it looked like, where the construction was in regards to Ship Fusion.

Maybe something will like, let us know what’s going on.

Kyle Rimkus: We visited the Circle K, just to figure out the relationship between those properties.

So by the time we visited, the Circle K was complete. It had been built, and of course from the photos we could figure out where the pallets had been dropped, which of course was in a parking lot next to the tank where you air up your tires. And yeah, that whole area of North Las Vegas just a few years ago was just dirt. And now has a huge number of fulfillment warehouses like ours as well as restaurants and businesses and all kinds of things.

So, it was interesting to see the Circle K, but it was also really interesting to see where our pallets had been sitting and knowing that they had posters stuck to the side of them making it very obvious where they were destined for, and who they were supposed to be for, which was Ship Fusion, the name of our warehouse. And you could turn your head and see the name of Ship Fusion on the side of a building across the street. So there was no mistaking that they were putting it in the right place.

It was clearly in the wrong place.

It was pretty funny.

Cabel Sasser: And my favorite part of that story by far is that they went to the Circle K that was now open, but not just that they went to the Circle K, but they both bought slushies from the Circle K.

And expensed it, which just delights me to no end. And I just got this like, “do you approve this $2 and 84 cent purchase in Circle K?” And I’m like, yes, this is happening.

Jennifer Lieb: We went inside the Circle K and got frozen Dr. Pepper, Slurpees, because that’s what you do when you are trying to solve a mystery.

Christa Mrgan: Uh, just a quick note here that the signature icy beverage offering from circle K is actually called the Froster. No one cares, but it felt important. Okay.

Jennifer Lieb: so we go see the Circle K. It’s nice. There’s obviously no evidence there. We went to In-N-Out Burger because like we’re in Vegas and they now have In-N-Out,

Christa Mrgan: Those are good burgers, listeners.

Jennifer Lieb: And then we drove to the Police Department and it’s like the most decrepit looking building.

It’s just sad. Like it’s sad from the outside. It’s sad from the inside, like it’s just a sad place. And it was also really hot inside, so it was March. It wasn’t super hot yet in Vegas. But you walk in and it was like, there was no airflow, like they had intentionally made it so you wouldn’t wanna sit in there.

And I remember the person who’d been waiting the longest was like four hours.

Christa Mrgan: DUNH DUNH!

Jennifer Lieb: We didn’t wait four hours. I think we waited like 30 minutes.

Christa Mrgan: Oh, okay. That’s not so bad.

Jennifer Lieb: They called us up, we talked to this really nice officer. I had actually printed everything. So I had a whole police narrative. I had the photos I had printouts of all the serial numbers that got registered, who they’re registered to, our screenshots of different Facebooks, the different ways we got evidence and the whole nine yards. And the officer spends, you know, a few minutes kind of reading, digesting, and gets done and looks at us and says, “wow, you’ve, yeah, you’ve really got it all, don’t you?” And then he said, “have you gone and talked to any of these people?”

And I look at him like. Why would we have gone and talked to anyone? Like, I thought that’s vigilante justice. Like, you’re not supposed to do that. And he goes, well, I mean, yeah, but you could. That’s what I’m gonna do. And we’re like, okay, well cool. Please do that!. So we leave . We go to the pawn shop.

Kyle Rimkus: Should we get into why we visited a pawn shop?

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. How could we not get into it? So remember that eighth playdate that got registered in early March.

Kyle Rimkus: The eighth person to register a device, turns out, works in media.

Jennifer Lieb: That unit was registered to someone in North Las Vegas who

Cabel Sasser: Allegedly

Jennifer Lieb: worked for a very popular show about pawn shops.

Kyle Rimkus: And one of the organizations he works with is affiliated with a very touristy pawn shop in Las Vegas. And so we thought, just on a whim we can’t go to Las Vegas and not check if there’s just a pile of Playdates at a pawn shop. Because we had already checked Craigslist and Facebook and several other online sources of how these devices might be getting fenced.

And none of them came up anywhere. And so we thought, well, maybe it’s at a pawn shop.

Jennifer Lieb: There’s absolutely no Playdates at the pawn shop, 'cause of course there were never gonna be, but there’s some other interesting things.

Kyle Rimkus: There’s no trace. We felt very silly walking around all the sports memorabilia and things in the touristy pawn shop.

Jennifer Lieb: And then we kind of looked at each other like, oh, what do you wanna do? Like, should we go to a casino? And no, neither of us wanted to go to a casino.

Kyle Rimkus: We went back to the airport.

Jennifer Lieb: It was a really long day, and we really didn’t do anything like, it didn’t feel, like we got a lot accomplished.

Christa Mrgan: But they had at least filed a police report. And while they couldn’t file a report online.

They could at least get a copy of the filed report via email. No just kidding. Actually, Jen had to mail a self-addressed, stamped envelope with a $5 check inside it, along with a letter stating which report she wanted, and a copy of her driver’s license-- since she was the one who failed to report-- to the North Las Vegas police department.

And she didn’t actually receive that copy until mid April. Not with any kind of update or anything, just like the copy of the initial report which also had the name of the detective assigned to our case. Whom she called many, many times leaving messages over several weeks but she never got a call back. And still hasn’t as of November.

Cabel Sasser: The police, for whatever reason-- I’m gonna, I’m gonna be kind, were not super interested in, in our plight. We called a lot. I called a lot. I tried to get information. What’s happening with our case? And just got nowhere. Now, to be fair. The police of North Las Vegas probably have a lot on their plate, and there’s probably like, I don’t know, murders or things they have to think about.

Not a bunch of handheld gaming systems with a crank that have gone missing. So we were probably on the bottom of somebody’s pile, but we were getting nowhere, and we had all this information, so it was super frustrating. It’s like, if I was a, hard-boiled police detective and someone came to me and said, here’s a file with all this information.

All you gotta do is like, drive over here. I’d be pretty stoked. It feels like an easy win, but they were not interested. And that is when we made the ultimately fruitful decision to hire a private investigator. Like Magnum P.I.

Christa Mrgan: Exactly like Magnum PI.

Cabel Sasser: Not at all like Magnum P.I. Flower shirt! Wait, is that Magnum P.I.?

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, that’s him.

Cabel Sasser: Did he drive a Trans Am? No, he drove something. It was a cool car.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. According to Wikipedia, Magnum P.I., the fictional private investigator from the television series of the same name, drove a Ferrari 3 0 8 GTS, which was actually owned by the wealthy author Robin Masters, who also owned the Hawaiian estate where Magnum lived in a guest house. Anyway, we decided to hire a P.I… And to do that, we needed a P.I. … I. That’s right. We hired a private investigator investigator. Someone. I’ll call “Devin.” “Howington.” Because that’s her name.

Devin Howington: Hi, I am Devin Howington. Normally I’m a mediator, but my role at Panic was a private investigator investigator.

The folks that Panic had compiled quite a dossier of information and had not had any success with the police. And so after the police report went un resolved for some time, they decided to hire a P.I. And so everybody at Panic’s pretty busy. Everybody at Panic has a lot of different roles. And at the time I was not so busy and, here’s my conflict of interest statement: I’m married to a Panic employee.

Kyle Rimkus: Devin is my wife, and I’ve been keeping her up to date as it’s gone on. It’s been a constant source of entertainment.

Devin Howington: And so that’s how I knew about all of this. So I had been kept up with the whole story unfolding. And so I think there was some talk at Panic about like, everybody’s really busy. We need to hire this P.I… Nobody really wanted to do that. And so they reached out to me to see if I wanted that job, and I said, “yeah, sure, why not?”

Jennifer Lieb: We hired her to investigate P.I.s, like, will a P.I. Do this? What will they charge?

What can we expect as an outcome? Yada, yada, yada.

Devin Howington: So I went to Google and I typed in, "how do you hire a P.I.?" And, you know, came up with a lot of really good stuff. I obviously knew about licensure and how to make sure that somebody did have an active license. That was kind of the number one thing.

This case was in North Las Vegas, and so we thought maybe it would be good to have somebody who was in the North Las Vegas area and was able to, liaise with the police. At that point, we were still thinking maybe the police could do their job.

And so, I literally like pulled up a map and started to put in like where these P.I. offices were, so I could get a sense of like, the city, because they also charge by the mile. So that’s an important thing to remember, is that’s what they’re doing for us, right? Is they’re driving around and asking a lot of questions. So, I made this spreadsheet of P.I.S, I waded through a lot of P.I. websites and saw all sorts of interesting things that they offer in Las Vegas and tried to figure out who would look for stolen goods, which is not typical. A lot of times they are looking for hidden assets like in a divorce case or creating divorces by being like a honeypot for cheating spouses.

That’s a big one in Las Vegas. And so I decided kind of early on that I wasn’t gonna choose a PI firm that specialized in, going out and trying to see if your spouse would cheat on you with him. So that took a few people off the board.

One thing I was nervous about was the P.I. figuring out that I wasn’t a real Panic employee.

So it was important to me that I have a Panic email address, and have something really vague that I could stand by, like "project manager" as a title, like a, a Playdate, "missing Playdate project" was as my only project.

And so yeah, I just called a few folks and eventually found several that seemed interested and went from there.

Christa Mrgan: And meanwhile, as Devin was researching private investigators, FedEx got in touch with us. Not because Jen had finally had success in finding the right person to talk to there. But because Cabel had given a talk at GDC-- game developers conference-- it was all about the journey of making Playdate. And he mentioned the heist and FedEx.

Cabel Sasser: Two pallets of Playdates worth $400,000 have recently gone missing, and this is happening like this week. So this is breaking news. Don’t, like-- we don’t need to share this with anybody, but, um, let me tell you the story, if you’re interested.

It’s a bit of a true crime drama.

In my GDC talk, I talk about lots of Playdate related things, and I mentioned this story very briefly that we, you know, of the many misadventures of the Playdate story, that we are missing a bunch of Playdates and FedEx maybe lost them and we’re trying to figure it out and all this stuff.

And then like a month later we got an email from FedEx. And I’ll ruffle the paper, so the sound of me picking up the paper is on the podcast. I think that’d be cool. Okay. It went into our general email box, and what I love about this email from FedEx is that, presumably accidentally, they left their whole internal chain of forwards in this email, which made me even happier.

And so I’m not gonna say anyone’s name 'cause that’s probably rude. “Rude” is my concern? But I will, I will now read to you. This is from someone at FedEx and then it was to the Global Network Communications Division of FedEx, and it was CC’d to some additional people. And the subject line of the originating email in this chain was “FedEx mention 400K of gaming handhelds missing.”

"Hi team, this may be on your radar. Bubbling up a story about two pallets from a Las Vegas shipping center worth $400,000 worth of Playdate gaming handhelds went missing the story notes that the customer mentioned his concerns and was told FedEx delivered them, and the shipping center had no trace of them."

And I love this part: “This story does have the potential to go viral. I wanted to bring it to your attention.” Then it was forwarded to somebody else and CC’d to three additional people. “Hey, just making sure this is on your radar. This person’s monitoring for social traffic.” And then somebody replied, “please look into this and keep me updated. Thanks. Sent from my iPhone.”

And then finally the email to us at the top of the chain from the FedEx Executive Office:

"Hello, I am contacting you on behalf of the FedEx Executive Office. I am researching this inquiry to see if possibly pertains to your business. Please follow up and provide feedback. Your assistance is greatly appreciated."

Something about quote, this story does have the potential of going viral unquote is like the most revealing insight into how anything gets accomplished in modern times, which is so infuriating.

I know there’s that famous Steve Jobs quote in the app store review guidelines where he said uh, you know, “running to the press never helps.”

And we always joke that like, running to the press is the only thing that helps. But certainly, if I had not given that talk at GDC and if the Verge, et cetera, hadn’t written about that portion of my talk at GDC, we never would’ve heard from FedEx. No, I mean, FedEx, if you’re listening, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I’m probably right.

There’s no way you would’ve talked to us if it wasn’t for that, which is kind of messed up. And yet, as someone that runs a company and you have to deal with PR and how do you focus your attention on the right things, like I kind of understand. Although, I can’t imagine running a business as big as FedEx, that sounds like a hellscape.

But we finally heard from FedEx.

Jennifer Lieb: From this executive level person in the communications department for FedEx. He called-- end of April or so, maybe three quarters of the way through the month. And we had a great talk and I explained everything and I could tell he didn’t-- I don’t wanna say he didn’t believe me, but he definitely was like, “eh, sounds interesting.”

Cabel Sasser: He was suspicious kind of about the story, but then we literally had photos of it misdelivered, FedEx goofing and putting this thing in the wrong place, and there wasn’t much he could say after he saw the photos. And I think it was just kind of a sense of like, “oh man, that’s not great. Let us know how it goes.” I wish that he could be interviewed for this podcast, but I suspect the FedEx legal team would like absolutely lose their minds and probably fire him immediately. But he was sympathetic and did a little research.

Jen can tell you more about those conversations, because he was also great at using Southern idioms and expressions that were just delightful throughout the calls, and I hope that she remembers some of those.

Jennifer Lieb: I gotta remember it, he says, “as my mama used to say, there’s more than tomatoes in that soup.” And I did not laugh, which was good, 'cause I, you know, I thought it was amazing. But I said, " I don’t really understand that phrase." And he goes, " well, I think you’re onto something. Like, there’s something weird going on here. That’s what it means." And I said, “cool. What do you think’s going on?” And he goes, “well, I’m gonna do some investigation. I’m gonna get back to you.” And he’s been great this whole time. He’s been very communicative. Every time I’ve called and left a message or emailed of like, “Hey, can you gimme a call?” He always calls within 24 hours, like, very happy.

Cabel Sasser: But there was kind of obviously like a limit to what he could do and like, you know,

I, I kind of had this, like naive dream that FedEx would be like, “you know what? This was on us. We’re cutting you a check for $400,000.” It doesn’t work that way, I guess, in the real world. So, you know, we didn’t get a lot of traction with FedEx other than, he said to Jen that although he cannot discuss the specifics about the person that delivered our pallets to a empty construction site, that it, it had been dealt with in some way.

It is a personnel matter. Now, that could mean they did absolutely nothing, or that could mean the person was fired, or they got like a gift basket, or I don’t know. But anyways, it was super interesting and I just will cherish this email chain forever.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. So FedEx did end up being at least somewhat sympathetic, if not actually helpful in a meaningful way, but hopefully there won’t be any more pallets full of handheld gaming consoles dropped carelessly at construction sites in the desert anytime soon.

So let’s get back to Devin’s hunt for the private investigator.

Jennifer Lieb: She did great work and came back to us and gave us our options.

Devin Howington: I didn’t feel like I needed to be the one to choose, because it felt to me like a philosophical difference that I felt like Panic needed to weigh in on. They all had two things in common: they said, “wow, you did a lot of work. This is really a lot of information that you already have.” And the second thing was, " that’s a really sweet email address."

Cabel Sasser: There was a brief diversion in choosing the right private investigator, and there were really two leads that we were most interested in.

Devin Howington: One PI that I had contacted was this grizzled, like ex-cop who was really excited about, building a case and seemed extremely Interested in piling up the felony charges and making sure that they had everything for all the charges that we wanted to charge these folks with.

One of my questions to all the, P.I.S is like, “so say you open the garage and you see the devices in there, like, what do you do?” And this guy didn’t really answer that question all that well. Like, He was like, “well, you know, we’d, call the cops” or something like that. Which is fine.

Maybe that’s what you should do. And the guy we ended up hiring said, “well, I just see if we could like run a truck and see if we could just take 'em back to the warehouse.” And I was like, that’s a great answer. Like, that’s what I like to hear. Let’s just get those Playdates back to the warehouse.

Getting the devices back was priority number one, as indicated to me by Panic. And then whatever else happens, we will figure that out later.

So it came down to this ex-cop and then this other guy who was very nice, easy to talk to, asked me a lot of questions, and had the good answer about like, let’s just take them in a truck to the warehouse.

And so I submitted this information to Panic, right?

Cabel Sasser: One of them didn’t seem like a good fit, and that was mostly because he seemed very intent on like getting prosecution wins and like super busting people and he was an ex-cop and it seemed like maybe a little more intense, when really we just want the Playdates back.

But then also we came across their Twitter profile and it totally had like the dude in the sunglasses, in the car avatar. And although I cannot reveal his Twitter handle, it did end in 007, which was enough for us to be like. "Hmm, this combo might not be great for this situation." No offense to anyone that has 007 in their Twitter handle.

I mean, it is cool. He was a secret agent. But uh, not for this, not for this situation. And so yeah, we, we chose a, P.I. that seemed really interested in this, and could do the work. And I don’t know all the details of what happened at this point other than he really did a lot of work and took our leads and really got to the bottom of this.

Zachary Stanczak: I didn’t really work that hard at the end of the day.

Like I showed up, asked some pointed questions, and then situation kind of resolved itself.

So my name is Zachary Stanczak. I work with True Investigations as a private investigator. Specifically SIU Gimme one second, 'cause I always forget what the acronym stands for.

Special investigative unit. Okay. So yeah, just the private investigator

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, we ended up hiring Zachary because he was more interested in getting the Playdates back then busting people. So Devin gave him the dossier of information that Jen, Kyle and other Panic folks had put together. And he just went out and started talking to people. And the first person he spoke to was the one who had registered that eighth playdate unit.

Jennifer Lieb: And that unit was actually the linchpin that ended up solving everything.

Christa Mrgan: Yes, a linchpin! I love a linchpin.

Zachary Stanczak: From the beginning, it was essentially just "cool. I’m gonna look up everybody that has registered an email address and then just kind of work my way down the list.

Like "where did you get this?"

So I went to the first person’s address, I just knocked on the door. And , I just kind of like, “Hey, you know, I’m looking for certain devices. Your email address showed up.” And he kind of gave a bit of a runaround of like, “oh yeah, I have those devices. I bought it from the, the back of someone’s truck at a random gas station.”

“And do you know when you did this?” He couldn’t necessarily remember a time. So like, “do you know what gas station you did this from?”

" No."

He said he bought it from to quote, and I just like it because it was like he was trying to throw me off the case, he said, some black guy in the back of a truck.

Christa Mrgan: Oh, cool, yeah. Great. He thought saying "a black guy did it" would make it sound more believable, because racism. Ugh. But he gave him that Playdate back, right then and there.

Zachary Stanczak: So I got that, and so then I crossed their names off the list. I went to the initial person who signed for it-- well, I went to his dad’s house.

Christa Mrgan: Yes. Here’s where the pieces really start falling into place. So, folks had Panic had initially thought that the person who signed for the shipments was this high level person at the construction company that built the Circle K, because the names were very close. He had the same last name as the signer, but a different first initial. But it turns out that that person has a son who also works for that construction company. And that son shares his last name. And his first initial does match that of the person who signed for both FedEx deliveries.

Okay. But so Zachary started at the father’s house.

Zachary Stanczak: I ended up getting ahold of him on the phone. I went to his place of work. He pretty much just kind of like outlined the whole thing that, you know, there’s, two pallets that came, his son signed for them, even helps him with a pallet jack to move those to ship Fusion.

Didn’t know about any other shipments that happened. Nothing else about the situation. I didn’t mention “hey, well, you know, your Son-In-Law actually just gave me one.”

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. So that eighth unit to be registered was the linchpin, because it turns out that the guy who registered it and then spun that story about buying it off the back of a truck is married to the sister of the guy who signed for both shipments of Playdates-- something Kyle and Jen figured out through Facebook. So now it’s pretty obvious that this is

like a family crime ring. Except not an organized or a sophisticated one. Because what sophisticated criminal would use their real name to sign for a delivery they were just going to steal.

It’s more of a family crime of opportunity ring.

Zachary Stanczak: The father says, yeah, you can go talk to my son. He’s on site right now. He’s at this location. Go ahead and head down there. So I drive to the construction site. I find the son, explain why I’m there.

“Hey, I’m looking for these devices. You signed for them.” He reiterates the same story that there was only two pallets that came. I helped to move them over. That was it. I don’t know what else was going on. Couldn’t give exact dates. As he said they always get so many shipments on construction sites, which is true.

There’s a lot of stuff that comes in and out and sometimes you don’t really know what’s going on there or anything like that. So we said, okay, and then I left from there.

And then when I got back to the office, Devin reached out to me. I think I did all of those interviews between about 8 and 10:00 AM And then, so I was back in the office by noon, talked at Devin, and she was like, "what happened?" I said, "what are you, what are you talking about?"

Cabel Sasser: The P.I. started I think on like a Monday. Maybe a Tuesday,

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, it was a Tuesday, because that Monday was a holiday. Anyway.

Cabel Sasser: and then Thursday this whole thing flipped upside down

Jennifer Lieb: we got an email from our rep at Ship Fusion and said basically like, “Hey, these were like delivered. Here’s a serial number, like what are these?” And, and it was on a Thursday. I was actually working from home, and I read the email and I was walking upstairs to see if my husband wanted to go to lunch, and I just skimmed the email and thought, “oh man, another delivery got misdelivered. What is FedEx doing?”

Like I can’t even, I’m so annoyed at this point. And then I re-read the email and was like, “holy This is them, like it has to be them.” There was a photo that just showed these boxes being left at some random place, not on a pallet, so it wasn’t FedEx misdelivering. I called Kyle, and something about Panic is we do all of our communication pretty much like written: slack, email.

You don’t really call each other. None of us have like work phone numbers. Maybe you text, but you do not call. But it was such a big deal, and I was like freaking out, I called him and he answers and was like, “hello?” And I’m sure I scared him. And I said, "Kyle, have you checked your email?

In the last five minutes?" And And so he checks it and I hear this, “What?” And I said, “Look up the serial number! Look up the serial number!” Because I’m not a technical person. I’m a money numbers person, but not a coding person, so I have no idea how to look up these serial numbers.

So he looks at the serial number and like five seconds later goes, “oh my goodness. It’s, it’s them. It’s, it’s the units.” And we conferenced in Cabel, 'cause again, such a big deal we had to call someone else. So I conferenced in Cabel and he was at lunch at Thai Peacock, where he always is, with Steve.

Christa Mrgan: I love this detail, because he is always there And Thai Peacock is great. Definitely check it out if you ever visit us in Portland.

Jennifer Lieb: he answered the phone like, "hello?" And I said, "Cabel! We have the units. We have the missing units. They got dropped off!"

Cabel Sasser: All of the Playdates have been mercilessly dropped off, dumped, ditched, abandoned in like a ridiculously photogenic way at some mysterious, under construction restaurant in the middle of North Las Vegas…

Zachary Stanczak: They were at like this restaurant under construction, like literally cattycorner from Ship Fusion.

Cabel Sasser: it kind of looked like a Cracker Barrel to me, but I don’t think it was a Cracker Barrel. I wish it was a Cracker Barrel, 'cause that’d be kind of funny.

Christa Mrgan: It would. Cracker Barrel is an inherently funny chain restaurant. And, notably: the restaurant was not being built by the same construction company that built the Circle K, because that’s immediately where my mind went.

Cabel Sasser: You would be totally wrecking your story if it was the same construction company.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, but again, like this guy used his own name to sign for these stolen Playdates, right? I could see it! But, anyway.

Cabel Sasser: My theory is: this was next is Ship Fusion, which was critical because that’s where they got them, so they knew that’s where they belonged.

And it’s under construction so there’s no cameras, and there’s no people, and there’s no staff.

And we’ve just got these photos of this parking lot and just all of these Playdate cartons, just like askew and stacked on the ground.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, you should check out the photos in the show notes.

Zachary Stanczak: Obviously what happened is they got spooked, or, you know, immediately after that interview, he had left his construction job.

Probably had to grab a couple people, because that’s a lot of boxes that they unloaded pretty quickly.

I did that, so it was cool, like immediately off the bat, talked to like two, three people and we already recovered like the majority of the devices.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. And Ship Fusion got these back because a police officer called them and said they’d received an anonymous tip about some things left at an abandoned construction site that might belong at the warehouse. So, hey: the police did at least show up!

Kyle Rimkus: It does seem like the bare minimum. But yes. That was a, a surprise success for sure.

Cabel Sasser: And that was after just a few days of sniffing around. Like, that’s amazing to me. It is very clear that the first few people that he talked to from our list of leads were like, “oh crap.”

And there was probably some excited texting and phone calls and. Everything was ditched. Which is good news! That was good news. We were like, “Yay, we did it! We got 'em all back. Except we didn’t, we didn’t quite get 'em all back. But that’s a whole 'nother wrinkle.”

Jennifer Lieb: They tell us like, “yeah, there’s 1,906 units,” and the total was 1,920 units, so we were only missing 14.

Christa Mrgan: We had most of the devices back, so we had pretty much declared this whole thing, a success. But Zachary wasn’t done yet. The case got solved so quickly that he still had a bunch of time left on his retainer. So he kept following the threads.

Zachary Stanczak: From there, I continued going down the remaining devices that were listed on there. And that’s where it gets even funnier because one of the women that had three devices, she said, “yeah, I got them from my neighbor.”

Christa Mrgan: And Zachary didn’t even need to look up her address, because Jen had found it on a charter school fundraiser PDF, which is wild. And that neighbor was the guy who signed for both shipments of Playdates.

Zachary Stanczak: And I said, “oh, okay.” “Yeah, he just came by.” He was like, “do you have kids?” And she was like, “yeah.” She’s like, " hey, give these to them. You know, they’ll, they’ll love them."

And then there was another guy I talked to and he was a roofer and he said, "I did a consultation

for the neighbor."

Christa Mrgan: And again, just for clarity, that neighbor is the same guy-- the one who signed for both shipments of Playdates.

Zachary Stanczak: And told him, "you know, like, you don’t have any real issues.

There’s some pigeons in there, but they’re not roosting in your attic. They’re roosting outside of it." And the neighbor was super grateful and gave him a Playdate device as a tip.

So I had two separate people confirm that this same guy gave out multiple devices. So like if this was like we were doing a hard line investigation, this was pretty much dead to rights, we got 'em.

Christa Mrgan: It was this kind of the best. It’s so funny to me that this guy apparently couldn’t figure out how to sell these Playdates and make money off of them, so he’s like giving them to his sister and his brother-in-law, his neighbor, a roofer who did a consultation on his house? This was so clearly not like a premeditated heist.

Cabel Sasser: Allegedly?

Zachary Stanczak: Yeah, just a crime of opportunity. And then more than that, it kind of I think just turned into a small errand for them. That you have 2000 devices sitting in your garage that you can’t use or… you just start handing them out.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, I guess. So Zachary managed to track down quite a few of those 14 missing units, but there were still seven that remained unaccounted for. Until…

Kyle Rimkus: the day after all the units were recovered, a ninth device was registered with, of course, a new email address.

I couldn’t find any information about that email address, but we handed that email address over to the P.I. as well.

Zachary Stanczak: When those boxes got dropped off, there was a landscaping company that was working in the area. They saw a bunch of boxes randomly get dropped off and curiosity piqued, and they went through, snaked about seven more devices, and went off.

Christa Mrgan: That’s right: seven of these Playdates were double stolen!

Kyle Rimkus: Also, why only take seven? Like, why not take a whole carton?

Christa Mrgan: Again, these are clearly not like sophisticated criminals. I think it was more of a, “Hey, don’t mind if I do” kind of thing.

Zachary Stanczak: Devin called me and she said, “Hey, you know, a couple more devices like popped up,” and I was like, “cool, just, just send 'em over and I, and I’ll go check those out.”

And I chased one of the emails to this person. Called them. She said, "oh, my husband brought these devices back from his landscaping company." Called the husband.

He said, “oh, one of my employees did that. I absolutely told him not to go into those boxes. And then he did, and then like, kind of distributed them out.” Said, okay, “can I, can I get those back?” And he said he’ll try to get as many back as he could. Think I got three back from that.

Christa Mrgan: He also got another one back from a guy who’d been given one by the sister of the guy who signed for them-- that is, the wife of the person who registered that linchpin eighth device. Anyway, there are still a few Playdates missing from this stolen shipment, but it’s pretty amazing how much info even a lay person can get from an email. And of course, a private investigator can find out even more.

Zachary Stanczak: Private investigators have access to certain databases that we can use in certain situations. We can’t use all of them for every case. But there are some that we, we can use for certain things, especially in cases that are involved in like legal matters. There’s also still free resources. Although White Pages don’t exactly exist in the context that they once did back in the nineties, there’s still a lot of public record information and then there’s still sites that filter that out.

Unless someone goes out of their way to make themselves not publicly listed, you can usually get a name and address and phone number off the internet. So, it was just a matter of like using a database for the email addresses.

Cabel Sasser: I think people massively underestimate their presence on the internet and how much just a single email address gets you.

Christa Mrgan: Uh, cool. That’s great, and not at all unsettling. But it did work out really well for us in this case!

Cabel Sasser: Yeah, that private investigator did an awesome job. I mean, we gave him a head start. Sure. But like he did the legwork. I, I’m not gonna knock on a bunch of people’s doors and be like, “Hey, can I have my Playdate back?” So yeah, we were super impressed.

Zachary Stanczak: I have a, special love of just showing up to a spot and being like, “Hey, I have questions about this one thing.” And I’ll make a lot of calls too, but just that in person approach and just trying to ask questions that’s usually at the end of the day what most of my job consists of.

I don’t necessarily know the the full science behind it, but it’s generally easier to get information from someone if you’re face to face. Just actually like suddenly showing up and catching someone off guard. If they’re not expecting you and you start asking 'em questions, you can kind of read how they’re reacting to it, what they’re doing.

And I feel like it’s just, people are more inclined to help in those situations, too. Like you know, if they’re not the person that did whatever occurred. Like if someone asks you for help, I think just as humans, we are more inclined to like, oh, you’re there and you need me. Cool. It makes us feel good that I am providing you something. So I just really try to capitalize on that.

Christa Mrgan: Plus there’s the factor of “private investigator” kind of sounding official or scary, or kind of authoritative in a nebulous way.

Zachary Stanczak: You know, it’s just my little card. You get it. You have to take a test, you have to get licensed. And, and that’s really it. You show up and you, and you say that, and it has an official kind of quality to it. So it’s like I’m not just some random person who just started asking questions. I’m not somebody that somebody found on Craiglist, you know? Like they found somebody that literally had to be licensed and then now they’re in your face and they’re asking you questions. So I think there’s like almost an intimidation factor, because we perceive it as authority, even though it’s not authority.

Sometimes you can get lucky with that, but again, too: anybody listening to this, if a private investigator asks you questions, you really don’t have to answer any, but they are always grateful if you do.

So like, you can show up to someone’s house and knock on a door and ask a question if they answer. Now, if you stand there for 10 minutes and they tell you to go away and you keep pestering them and then it becomes harassment, obviously you crossed a line.

We don’t do anything like that. Especially in Nevada, we’re an open carry state.

You don’t have to have a license for a gun. So yeah, I definitely don’t wanna walk on someone’s property and get shot. But, no one’s gonna do that off the bat.

Christa Mrgan: I don’t know, man, that seems like a big assumption to make. And just going up to a person who may or may not have a gun, and saying, “Hey, can you help me out with this ongoing investigation?” seems daunting.

I guess Magnum P.I. also just went up to people all the time and started asking questions, too? But that was in Hawaii, and he had that cool car, and also was a fictional character on a television show. But anyway, we got most of the stolen Playdates back, which is wild.

Cabel Sasser: I can’t believe we did this, and got these back. Because honestly, again, we really need them. We’re not a big company. This is a lot of money for us, and oh, I can’t even imagine if we had tried to do an insurance claim and, you know, everybody knows how bad insurance is and what a racket that is, they definitely would’ve found a way to deny our claim or, you know, you name it. And so having them back, it just felt great.

It was. The perfect ending to, to this scenario. I hoped that it could happen, but I didn’t really think it would, if I’m being honest, but it did. Yeah. And now we got Playdates, which is great. I hear they’re pretty good.

Christa Mrgan: They’re pretty good.

Wow.

I guess the moral of this story is that if a couple of pallets worth of Playdates get stolen, you should assemble a complicated dossier, skip the police, and hire a private investigator immediately. And maybe another moral is: if you decide to steal a couple of pallets of Playdates, don’t use your real name to sign for them and then start handing them out to friends and family who will use their email addresses to register them. And also-- it turns out there are a lot of lessons to be learned here-- if you work for a landscaping company, don’t double steal any Playdates you happen to find lying around abandoned construction sites!

But above all else: it’s important to take the time to stop and slurp the not-Slurpees.

Anyway: all’s well, that ends well! Now let’s make like Magnum P.I., and drive this borrowed Ferrari off into the sunset.

Thanks so much for listening, and please don’t steal our Playdates. Because we will find you.

Cabel Sasser: Allegedly.

Christa Mrgan: And in case you missed it, we just announced that there will be a Season Two of Playdate games, and it’s happening in 2025. I can’t give you too many details just yet, but it should include about a dozen games, plus a super secret special thing that we also can’t tell you about just yet. But a Season Two of games means an official Season Two of the podcast, with all new developer interviews. So stay tuned for that, and in the meantime, keep an eye out for occasional episodes that I’ll drop between now and then, right here on the Playdate Podcast feed. Thanks again. And bye for now.

The Playdate Podcast was written, produced and edited by me, Christa Mrgan. Cabel Sasser and Simon Panrucker composed the theme song. Additional music was also composed by Cabel Sasser as well as by Panic’s own Michael Freuden.

Huge thanks to Tim Coulter and Ashur Cabrera for wrangling the podcast feed and working on the website, James Moore for making me an awesome Playdate audio extraction app, Kaleigh Stegman for handling social media, and Neven Mrgan, who created the podcast artwork and site design.

And thanks, as always, to everyone at Panic. Playdates, including all of the ones we recovered, are currently sold out! But they should be back in stock in December and available to order at play.date.

Cabel Sasser: This story does have the potential of going viral.

It’s, it’s someone’s job to monitor social. That’s a weird job. Yeah. I mean, I do that every day. Nobody pays me for it, anyways. Okay. That’s my FedEx story.