Spam, The Meat Product, Is One Of The Most Stolen Items In Hawaii

Spam is a popular choice of theft among
criminals in Hawaii lately.

The paradise state of Hawaii is being hit by a crime wave.

A weird one.

Thieves are making off with lots and lots and lots of Spam.

Of course we'd all like it if someone were to steal the spam junk that we get in our inboxes and take it away, but that's not what I'm talking about.

It's Spam the meat product, says television station KHON.

Thieves, a large proportion of them drug addicts, are stealing it so often that some stores have been locking up the Spam, like they do watches and medications to protect their stocks.

Apparently, there's two reasons why Spam is suddenly such a hot commodity on the crime circuit.  For one, a lot of people in Hawaii love Spam for some reason, so it's easy to sell to gain cash to feed drug addictions.

Secondly, Hawaii lawmakers recently passed a law raising the threshold level for felony theft from $300 to $750, says KHON.

Thieves often try to stay just under that $750 threshold and they've discovered an easy way to do that is to just steal boxes or shopping carts full of Spam.

Of course, there are other items that are newly popular with thieves with the raised felony threshold, such as clothing, electronics and power tools.

But Spam seems to be the biggy.  This would make a great weird episode of Hawaii Five-0 wouldn't it?

Worse, some of the criminals are getting more brazen. Instead of just running when confronted by store security, a few of them have increasingly been responding with fists, knives, even guns.

Which puts these thieves back into the felony category, but I guess they didn't think that through very well.

We hope this crime trend doesn't spread. I'm not a huge fan of Spam, but I'd hate to see stores hit with thefts like this.