Truck Pirate Steals 20 Tons of Milka Chocolate in Major Candy Heist

Milka, a major global chocolate manufacturer, has been hit by a truck pirate who was able to forge his way to stealing a tractor trailer packed with about 20 tons of the good stuff.

The heist is estimated at about €50,000 ($55,000) and police are still looking for the truck and the driver, DW reports. The chocolate, too, though they have few chances of ever finding it.

According to reports in the local media, cited by the publication, the transport should have left the Milka factory in Bludenz, western Austria, destination Belgium. It did leave the factory, but it never made it to the destination, which is how the theft was discovered.

The company responsible for the transport outsourced it to a Hungarian trucking company, which, in turn, outsourced it to a Czech one. A truck with Czech license plates, driven by a Czech with proper documentation showed up, the chocolate was loaded and away it went. For good.

Police have since determined that the license plates on the truck had been stolen and that, unsurprisingly, the driver did not work for the Czech trucking firm he claimed to be employed by. Whether they have any leads has not been made public as of the time of writing.

While stealing chocolate may seem silly, it's not exactly unheard of. "In recent years we have seen a number of individual cases where loaded trucks never arrived – also containing chocolate," says a police spokesperson of this particular incident.

In reality, truck pirates will steal just about anything, using a variety of ways depending on their skill set and favorite M.O. In this case, they used the "classic" method of inserting themselves into an operation with fake documentation and have probably already disposed of the delicious cargo. Stealing food items is common with truck pirates because they're easy to sell on the black market, guarantee a quick profit and leave little traces for police to catch up with them.