Samsung Suffers $36 Million Device Robbery in Brazil

Mobile device manufacturer Samsung reportedly has been victimized by a huge robbery at one of its key facilities located in São Paulo, Brazil, in a hardware and mobile device heist authorities estimated at some $36 million.

Police accounts of the robbery said 20 armed men disguised as workers entered Samsung’s Campinas factory just after midnight during the facility’s night shift, according to a ZDNet report. The 200 staffers on duty reportedly went about their business as the thieves stocked seven trucks with notebooks, tablets and smartphones.

The crooks held a few employees hostage and confiscated the cell phone batteries of the remaining workers to prevent them from calling the police, according to reports. Samsung employees told police that the robbers remained at the factory for some three hours and that no one was hurt in the caper.

“We are very concerned about this incident. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. We are fully cooperating with the ongoing police investigation, and we will do our best to avoid it happening again,” Samsung said in a statement.

The local police believe the robbers could have gained the cooperation of workers inside the facility, suggesting that perhaps it was an inside job. The criminals appeared to have advance knowledge of where some valuable items were located, reports said.

While stealing computer hardware is common, larger-scale robberies of IT equipment are rare. In November 2012, thieves made away with some $2 million in new Apple (AAPL) iPad Mini tablets from the same JFK Airport cargo site made famous in the 1978 heist dramatized in the movie “GoodFellas.”

The robbers pilfered about 3,600 iPad Mini units shipped by Cargo Airport Services and newly arrived from China. They hit the cargo building sometime before midnight, using the airport’s forklifts to move two skids worth of the tablets onto a waiting truck. In characterizing the robbery as an inside job, authorities said the burglars were waylaid from stealing three more stocked pallets by airport personnel returning from a dinner break.

A JFK cargo worker was arrested soon after, subsequently convicted and sentenced to two years in a federal prison along with a $1.4 million restitution fine.