Blaggers grab £150k worth of memory from Newbury distie

Rombyte turned over

By Robert Blincoe • Get more from this author

Posted in Business, 16th January 2001 13:54 GMT

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Thieves have stolen £150,000 worth of memory chips from Newbury based distributor Rombyte.

The theft has been described as a very professional and organised. The raiders cheekily set Rombyte's alarms off and then waited until the premises were checked for a break-in and given the all clear, before carrying out the raid.

The memory heisters triggered Rombyte's alarms at around 10.30pm on Thursday 11 January by snipping the distributors BT phone lines. Once one of the firm's directors had been out to check things over and left, they pulled the bull bars off a window and got in the building.

Sales director Jazz Dhillon described the raid as textbook stuff. "These were very determined people. They even took a wall down inside." Dhillon discovered there had been a break in when he arrived for work the following morning.

Rombyte's BT lines were cut from down a manhole so the location of the break wasn't discovered until BT started investigating the problem.

The thieves got away with 168-pin PC-100 DIMMs, 133-pin PC-100 DIMMs and 72-pin EDO product.

Dhillon urged other distributors to be very careful and to make sure their staff were kept safe. "There is a lot of this going on and people need to take extra care," he said. ®