T'is the season for gift giving, friends and family, spreading yuletide cheer, and...multi-million dollar electronics heists? Proving that Monday's daring theft of over $12 million worth of motherboards and CPUs (now rumored to belong to Intel) from a Malaysian warehouse complex was no fluke, robbers in Staffordshire, England have succeeded in liberating about $2.1 million worth of Xbox 360s from a pair of delivery trucks -- in two separate incidents that occurred nearly a week apart. Although police have so far refused to make a connection between the lorryjackings, the fact that both trucks belonged to the same company -- Hellman Worldwide Logistics -- suggests that the bandits found security so lax on the first go-round that they decided to strike again while the iron was hot. According to reports, the most recent heist began after thieves tricked the truck driver into pulling over due to an object caught under his wheels, where they proceeded to drag him out of the cab, deliver a beating, and leave him injured on the side of the highway. Police are also speculating that, despite their success, the robbers were still of below-average intelligence, which is the only explanation as to why they would try to jack Xbox's instead of the much more lucrative PS3. And, in completely unrelated news, Amazon was somehow able to offer 1,000 360s yesterday for only $100 each.

[Via digg]

In a daring early morning heist that could just as easily have been a scene from a movie like, um, The Heist, 20-plus well-organized robbers infiltrated a Malaysian warehouse complex on Monday, immediately subdued all 17 employees, and proceeded to steal over $12 million worth of microchips and motherboards. The thieves were able to gain access to the facility through a classic Trojan horse maneuver, wherein drivers of a truck that rolled up to the MASKargo Complex gate in Batu Maung, Penang tricked customs officials into believing that they were doing an undercover sweep for illegal immigrants. Once inside, the rest of the bandits lept out of the back of the vehicle and used chloroform to knock out the passive workers and sticks to beat down the non-compliant ones. It took the team nearly an hour to load up an astounding 18 pallets and 585 cartons full of components belonging to an unnamed multi-national corporation based out of Bayan Lepas, after which they sped off into the night with their valuable, high-tech booty. Police claim to have already captured two suspects in the case -- both were, shockingly , workers at the complex -- and are in the midst of hunting down the rest of the gang that pulled off what was clearly an inside job. As for the copious amount of missing PC hardware, officials speculate that the bandits will either sell them to shady OEMs on the black market, or, more likely, use them to build a supercomputer for leapfrogging to the top of the Folding@Home rankings.

[Via The Inquirer]