A YouTuber is currently in Mexico, under a restraining order, sitting on a finished video he legally cannot post, while $450,000 raised for someone else’s missing LEGO collection hangs in limbo. This is a real situation that exists in 2026.
This is the Bricks & Minifigs vs. Reckless Ben story, which started as a dispute over a missing LEGO collection in Oregon and has since accumulated arrests, a Utah RICO lawsuit, a restraining order, allegations of Mormon church connections, and a GoFundMe with over $450,000 raised that could be seized at any moment. If you tried to pitch this as a fictional drama, a network would tell you it was too much.
The LEGO Collection at the Center of Everything
Bryan Mansell says his father had a LEGO collection worth between $100,000 and $200,000. He made a deal to sell it to a Bricks & Minifigs franchise, which is a national chain that buys, sells, and trades LEGO sets, in Salem, Oregon. According to Mansell, corporate transferred ownership of that franchise to new operators, Brandon Best and Joshua Johnson, in November 2024. After the transfer, Mansell says he never got his LEGOs back and never got paid.
Bricks & Minifigs CEO Ammon McNeff appeared on a livestream on May 29, 2026, and said the company had no involvement in the consignment agreement at all, noting that responsibility sat with the parties directly in the original transaction. He also put the collection’s value at $60,000 to $80,000. He later revised that number upward to $95,000 to $100,000, which did not help his credibility on the valuation question.
What Reckless Ben Actually Did
Benjamin Paul Schneider, 30, who posts under the name Reckless Ben, published a one-hour-25-minute investigation video on May 21, 2026, laying out Mansell’s claims. He did not stop there. Over the following weeks, Schneider ran what he described as an investigation, organizing lottery-style raffles, creating a mock rival business he called “We Steal From Old People,” and showing up at Bricks & Minifigs locations in person.
On May 30, 2026, Schneider disclosed on YouTube that American Fork Police had arrested him on charges of stalking, targeted residential picketing, disorderly conduct, and criminal trespassing. He has claimed the arrest was the result of collusion between Bricks & Minifigs and local Utah law enforcement. He subsequently left the country and has been continuing to post videos from Mexico.
The RICO Lawsuit and the Restraining Order
On May 30, 2026, BAM Franchising, which is the corporate entity behind Bricks & Minifigs, filed a lawsuit against Schneider, Mansell, Reckless Ben LLC, and several others in Utah’s Fourth Judicial District Court. The claim invokes Utah’s RICO statute, alleging that Schneider and his associates “coordinated a campaign of extortion, harassment, defamation, nuisance, interference, trespassing, stalking and intimidation” against BAM’s franchise owners in Utah and Oregon.
Judge Tony F. Graf, Jr. granted BAM’s ex parte motion for a temporary restraining order on May 28, 2026. The TRO prohibits Schneider and anyone working with him from contacting or threatening the plaintiffs, going near their properties, doxxing them, defacing property, impersonating people to obtain information, recruiting undercover agents, creating fake raffles or contracts, and, in the clause that triggered the content freeze, posting, publishing, or disseminating any “false, misleading, harassing, interfering, defamatory or unlawful images or content” about the plaintiffs.
Schneider says the order was granted without giving him a chance to respond. “The court just heard their perspective, not mine,” he said in his most recent video. He also claims BAM told the court he had made bomb threats and had planned to murder store employees, allegations he denies and says the footage from his videos disproves.
Where $450,000 in Crowdfunding Is Stuck Right Now
Schneider says that if he posts Episode 3 of his Bricks & Minifigs series in violation of the TRO, three things happen simultaneously: he faces jail time, he loses his $300,000 counterclaim against the store owners, and the $450,000-plus raised on GoFundMe for Mansell gets seized by BAM. The restraining order puts those three consequences on the table at once, which is exactly what makes it an effective legal instrument regardless of how the underlying case eventually resolves.
The TRO applies only to Schneider and his team. It says nothing about anyone else. He noted this explicitly in his latest update, though he did not explicitly encourage anyone to do anything with that information.
The PR Damage That Can’t Be Contained
Two Bricks & Minifigs franchise locations have already been affected. Per Wikipedia’s verified coverage of the controversy, the Sacramento and San Luis Obispo locations faced targeted harassment and closure pressure. The Salem, Oregon, store, which was the one at the origin of the dispute, was announced as permanently closed on June 4, 2026, in what BAM described as a “mutual” agreement.
911 call volume to neighboring Utah police departments spiked during the height of the campaign. Schneider himself has explicitly told viewers to stop calling emergency services and to stop harassing businesses with no connection to the case. That he has to issue those statements reflects how far the audience response has run ahead of the actual legal proceedings.
A restraining order that prevents the creator from posting content has, predictably, done the opposite of killing the story. Every search query tied to this case is climbing. The narrative of a company using courts to silence a YouTube investigation is now larger than the investigation itself.
Sources
- YouTube: Reckless Ben Channel
- Wikipedia: Bricks & Minifigs–Reckless Ben controversy
- Utah Fourth Judicial District Court: BAM Franchising vs. Benjamin Schneider, et al.
About the Author
Your 33-year-old cousin who went to law school for one semester, dropped out, and now explains RICO statutes at every family barbecue using only fast food franchises as examples.
