Every update, newest first. Each one opens its own page with the full explanation and the public records behind it.
In July, the channel Total AFOL published a video asking who really controls Bricks & Minifigs, and it called the CFO, Reed Brimhall, a “silent partner.” An owner posted the video into BAM’s own internal Slack, a channel the company named #tmp-youtuber_social_attacks, and mentioned that another journalist, BJC, was digging into the Brimhalls too. Then BAM’s own Marketing Director answered the framing, not by denying Brimhall’s role but by scoffing at anyone who would shrink it: “As if he is not the CFO.” It is the company confirming internally what the public record already shows.
The YouTuber LUS cold-called three Bricks & Minifigs stores and a pawn shop and asked each the same question: what percentage do you pay for a collection. He got three different answers, and the owners of the chain watched. In two of their own Slack channels they worked out what had gone wrong, and in explaining it they described the pricing machine in their own words: percentages set by corporate, a shared script so customers cannot bid-shop between stores, and a standing rule never to quote a number over the phone. The problem, they decided, was not the numbers. It was the store that answered at all.
A young man took three of his own LEGO sets, a retired Death Star, a UCS X-Wing, and a Super Mario block, worth about $988 by BrickLink, into a Bricks & Minifigs to sell for his eighteenth birthday. One store offered $116 and said the LEGO was too dusty; another offered $500 for the same sets the same day. BAM’s own buying calculator, publicly downloadable with no login from a store website on BAM’s own domain, has a setting called “dust collector” that removes twenty percent, and it is the tool the manual BAM swore was private describes. This update reconstructs the $116, lets you run the calculator on any set yourself, and shows the manual refuting the store’s “take it apart and rebuild it” excuse in BAM’s own words.
On August 8, Bricks & Minifigs thanked its Facebook followers, starting with “the collectors who finally find that missing minifigure.” The day before, the complete Keizer police file became public: a collector, a collection the company acknowledges is still in the store, and about one hundred tagged minifigures a witness said were kept in a safe. This update places the two voices side by side, reproduces the post verbatim, emojis and all, and reconstructs the comment section, because the comment count keeps rising while the comments themselves have gone invisible, logged out and logged in. With the reception: a parody storefront, sold out, and a response video nineteen minutes after the post.
Bricks & Minifigs has given three sworn accounts of why it took, kept, and let its successors resell Bryan Mansell’s consigned LEGO collection: it was never a party, it was exercising its post-termination rights, it bought without notice. This interactive walks all ten routes those doors open, with the governing law and the provenance of every quote at each step, from the verified complaint to the Keizer police file. Every choice closes the paths you pass, and every route ends at a statement the company already made somewhere else, in writing or on tape. Pick a door and follow it.
This post marks the BAM Map’s 100th update, and it is a census: 685 documented contradictions from the company’s own record, every one graded, sourced, and deeplinkable as an immediate fact check, 422 of them published here for the first time. It opens with the rule this site has kept for a hundred updates and now names: Ammon’s Razor. Believe a company against itself. Searchable by topic, by kind of contradiction, and by proof. The whole ledger. So far.
A LEGO set has no serial number, so a sticker or a tag is the only thing that can identify it. Bryan Mansell’s family marked every consigned set and minifigure. Two of the store’s own former employees told the reopened police investigation that after Bricks & Minifigs took the store, the marks came off: one was told the marked items “needed to be removed,” the other watched the yellow stickers come off the sets “immediately after Best took over.” The new owner told the detective he never saw any markings at all. His own partner and both employees describe them.
We assembled every dated event in this story, eighty-seven of them, from four independent places: the consignment, the corporate paperwork, the police and the courts, and the public record. On nine days more than one clock struck at once. On three, the case against the man documenting the seizure moved the same day as the seizure’s own paperwork. On February 10, four events fell inside sixty-one minutes across two states. The judge who signed the gag warrant, hidden for months as a seal image, is named here, next to a second warrant a different judge cleared in twenty-six minutes.
BJC pried the complete 34-page Keizer police file loose under Oregon’s public records law, and it retells the takeover in the department’s own words. A detective reopened the case, re-read every seized recording, and concluded BAM and its operators “were informed of and aware” of the consigned collection, and acknowledge holding sets from it still. The owners’ own texts price its return: a signed release, deleted criticism, a formal apology. An officer had already warned that the property could be an Aggravated Theft I. The DA closed it as civil anyway, twice, and the collection never came back.
LEGO has no serial number, so the only trace a stolen set can carry is the record a resale shop chooses to make at the buy counter. Four LEGO theft-ring prosecutions across the country all broke at that counter, not at the shelf. Bricks & Minifigs wrote a manual that asks a seller for no name, no ID, and no holding period, and not one of its eight Utah stores appears on the state secondhand-dealer registry that GameStop and Best Buy file to, store by store. The company built the exact resale structure organized retail crime runs on, then stayed off the police database built to catch it.
One sentence in the Slack room every Bricks & Minifigs owner can read, in the week stores were still hunting their missing August inventory. The reply itemized what these owners say their franchisor does not give them: commitments, communication, follow-through, transparency, accountability. It is not a mood in search of a grievance. Every item on the list has a documented instance behind it from the same week, in the company’s own channel.
A newly released Keizer police report puts the consignment dispute in a police file: sets went in and did not come back, and by April 2025 the man asking after them was the one under investigation. The franchisor’s loss prevention team, watching a private Facebook group, warned the store he might lead an attack on it; the officer found the line had been written by a stranger and recorded no direct threat. He was warned to stop calling. Civil court, he told the officer, would cost him $70,000.
Every Bricks & Minifigs store is sold as independently owned, but the disclosure paperwork says its inventory comes from corporate itself, routed through one Fort Worth warehouse the company doesn’t own. A store’s own bill of lading proves the origin; the company’s internal Slack shows owners begging for missing product while the logistics chief was marked unavailable; and when the August LEGO wave ran short, the CFO’s family store was the one photographed fully stocked.
BAM sells its stores as independent, then hands them a required-vendor list it keeps off the contract they sign. Two vendors are not what they look like: the sign “choice” is one national broker wearing a local name plus one interior maker, and one of two mandated apparel vendors is owned by a fellow franchisee who also quietly runs BAM’s own merch store. BAM’s own franchise document is worded so a buyer never finds out.
A companion to the Bryan Mansell fact-check, built from the sales spreadsheet BAM filed in its own lawsuit. In BAM’s own numbers the collection prices to $110,455 to $122,455, and its final sale is dated two days before the takeover, after which the ledger records nothing. An independent BrickLink pull for every one of the 630 sales confirms the values, and the store sold the family’s property for about $52,822, of which the family, on a 65 percent consignment, saw about $13,800. Interactive, with the ledger published in full.
Reckless Ben has posted the recording of the first time he ever spoke to Bryan Mansell, a three-way call from spring 2025, made before Ben had ever driven to Oregon. This site ran the same test on it that it ran on BAM’s July statement: claim by claim, against a specific document, with the timestamp where he says it. Nine claims. Every one holds, and most of what confirms them is paperwork BAM filed in court itself, its own contract, its own sales ledger, its own recordings. The one number the documents cannot yet split, what he was paid against what was sold, is graded open, not green. Same method as the BAM check. Opposite result.
Every Bricks & Minifigs franchise is sold by the same short list of people, and one of them is not a McNeff: Darin Hicks, the Chief Development Officer, a one-man consultant who rents himself to franchise brands and, by his own words, recruits, approves, and onboards the owners. This site pulled the disclosure documents for the other brands he sells for. At the two where he ran the sales side, the company recruited hard and then took the owners who left to court. His other brand, ARCpoint, which he ran at the same time as Bricks & Minifigs, sued five of its own franchisees, one for nearly $1.2 million, while its stores closed year after year. The video, and the filings, are his own.
BAM Franchising filed a formal copyright takedown aimed at making its own operations manual disappear, and to file it, chief operating officer Matthew McNeff swore under penalty of perjury that the manual is genuine and that it is BAM’s. The notice, now public in the Lumen Database, names no copyright at all. It is the second time in a week BAM has moved to suppress material about how it runs, and the sworn attempt to bury the manual put a confirmation of it on the public record.
The photos from the night the Keizer store was seized had sound on them, and this site has confirmed whose voice it is: Brandon Best, the man BAM installed as the store’s new owner, talking inside the store in the window it was being emptied. The outgoing owner, Chrystal Law, is on the same recordings. The pictures were live photos, still frames that quietly saved a few seconds of video and audio around every shutter press, and they were released to the public with all of it intact. Independent commentators Aussie Insider and ThePunKing were first to flag that the images carried hidden clips; this site verified it, extracting and validating the audio and video directly from the files and confirming the speaker by voiceprint. The same video shows the priced, bagged minifigure inventory that was on hand that night.
In December 2025 Bricks & Minifigs had Reckless Ben criminally charged with trespassing at its Provo office, and the whole case turns on which side of one glass door he was on. The company’s own video puts the encounter in the building’s common corridor, a hallway the plats and county records say BAM does not own. The building belongs to a law firm: MHM Commercial II is the MacArthur Heder & Metler firm’s building and BAM’s landlord, and the McNeffs registered a company to hold the trademarks inside its suite. Yet the police affidavit that seized Ben’s entire Google account swore the event happened “inside the office.” Whether BAM could lawfully warn anyone off that shared hallway is an open question, argued out on the LUS broadcast and unanswered by the public record; what the records do answer is who that authority belongs to. The landlord. And the landlord never appears in the sworn account.
Every Bricks & Minifigs store presents itself as a local, independent business, and its website says so. Look closer and the 252 store sites are not 252 websites at all. They are one website. Every store address is a folder on the company’s own domain (bricksandminifigs.com/<city>); all of them are subsites of a single WordPress install, which by design lets one network administrator publish to, rewrite, or switch off any store’s site from one login. The same “local team” photo appears on 104 of them, another on 101, a single Oregon storefront on 125. And the company’s own manual says corporate creates and assigns each store’s Facebook and Instagram. Everything here is visible on the company’s public pages, without a login. The store the public is told is independent runs, on the web, on infrastructure one company builds, controls, and can switch off.
Section 17 takes one decision away from the owner: a store may not stop buying. Corporate “prohibits the practice of choosing to not buy/trade products from customers entirely,” and the next chapter repeats the rule with its own exclamation point. Section 18 is everything that carries the store’s name, and the manual walks it item by item: a logo LEGO already made the company change once, a palette matched to LEGO’s own, wall colors approved case by case, a list of subjects no store may take a stance on, marketing cleared through a corporate inbox down to t-shirts and bulk buckets, Facebook and Instagram accounts corporate creates and assigns, agencies that must sign their work over to the brand, one percent of gross to a fund spent at the franchisor’s discretion, and a sign the owner personally pays to take down if corporate calls it wrong. Read the way an owner would, the two chapters answer one question: which decisions are still mine?
The brand’s original Oregon store was bought in 2017 by one family: David Thornton behind the counter; his wife, Leah Brown; and her mother, Christina Cooper, 65 and, in her complaint’s words, “in poor health,” with over $120,000 of life savings in the store. The company used them both ways. Cooper’s own personal guaranty carried her $1.45 million elder-abuse suit, jury demand and all, into private arbitration; the courtroom audio of that half hour is published with this update, quote by quote. And the state registry shows that from 2019 to 2023 BAM’s registered agent, its official address for receiving lawsuits in Oregon, was Thornton himself, installed by a McNeff-signed filing whose consent he says he never gave and never knew about. BAM erased him as its agent five days after terminating the family’s franchise, and sued him six days after that.
Bricks & Minifigs steers its new franchisees to a Dallas real-estate firm called Morrow Hill, a recommendation its franchise disclosure document does not mention, and whose co-founder calls the company’s owners his “Utah Franchise Family.” This post does something narrower and duller: it reads the Texas record for exactly what Morrow Hill is. It is not one company. It is six of them, all at one Dallas address, and their paper trail holds three things worth setting down: a flagship that has worn three names, a habit of letting its companies lapse for unpaid taxes and reviving them, and an operating company a private-equity buyer now signs for.
The real-estate firm Bricks & Minifigs steers its franchisees to, and whose founder calls the McNeffs his “Utah Franchise Family,” renamed itself to a holding company on May 21, 2026, the day Part 1 was posted. That same day, in Utah, the McNeffs’ own asset-protection company, the firm that sells the rename-to-husk maneuver, did the identical thing to itself, twice. All three were pre-signed and all three took effect that day. With the LinkedIn post, the McNeffs’ reactions, and the three filings side by side.
A handful of independent channels cover the Bricks & Minifigs litigation full time, and they do not run on advertising; they run on their viewers, a few dollars at a time. The clearest picture of that is a handle that turns up in all of their chats: Savvy Turtle, who gifted 150 of the 150-plus memberships on one channel’s biggest night, the broadcast that was then pulled off the air mid-stream. This weekend, as another channel passed 10,000 subscribers, he was back at it. What the small-dollar audience says about who is really watching, and why a crowd is not a payroll.
A sealed LEGO set is worth more than an opened one; the Eugene store’s own listings prove it, boxed selling higher on 179 of 251 sets. So why would anyone open a box? Sections 13 through 16 of the Bricks & Minifigs operations manual, the pricing, purchasing, and processing chapters, are the company’s own answer: the pieces outsell the box, the counter pays on the set and collects on the parts, and the back room finishes the job with a heat gun and a can of Pam. The manual’s own worked example cracks an $18 set into $43–47 of figures and bulk, and its own reference chapter names the risk in the company’s own hand: the one buy rule exists “to prevent our stores from becoming a place to sell stolen goods.”
Bricks & Minifigs’ privacy policy promises, in writing, that only billing and customer-service staff are granted access to your personal information. BAM’s own central store system, readable without a login, shows the switch that would keep that promise turned off, alongside a second sign-in step and the page to set access up, on a switchboard the company actively uses for everything else.
On the biggest LEGO release day of the year, a look at the gift card in your drawer, and at what BAM’s own audited financial statements say is standing behind it: a company that lost money, owes more than it owns, and stays cash-positive only while the money it owes on gift cards keeps growing.
Section 12 of the Bricks & Minifigs operations manual is the vendor chapter: the part that tells a store owner where their inventory, their signs, even their shirts are allowed to come from. It is one of the clearest places in the book to see who actually decides how a store is run, in a business the company requires every owner, on every email, to call “independently” owned and operated. Can be found at bamopsmanual.com.
Bryan Mansell consigned his elderly father’s LEGO collection to a store to sell. The night it was seized, both sides were taking pictures. The first edition proved who took it and where it went; this edition adds when, and closes the record from the operators’ own documents.
Bricks & Minifigs credits its brand’s market research to BYU’s student advertising agency, and files the section title with the state. Every finding in it is something anyone knows about a used-LEGO store without asking a customer, and a chatbot given only the company’s one-line description writes the same list.
To prove to the Supreme Court of Ohio that it had obeyed a 2025 order finding it engaged in the unauthorized practice of law, Legally Mine filed a sworn affidavit of Daniel McNeff. In it he swears, under penalty of perjury, “I am the Owner of Legally Mine, LLC” and that he is “personally responsible” for the company’s compliance, fourteen months before the brand moved to a company controlled by Mark Comer. The oath is administered by Scott Anderson, a Utah notary whose commission lists his business of record as “Legally Mine, LLC”: the same in-house notary whose seal this site already documents on the deeds that moved the McNeff family homes into limited liability companies. The customer list, withheld here for the customers’ privacy, is what the court’s board found the company sells to, “medical professionals, including but not limited to doctors and dentists.”
Sections 10 and 11 of the Bricks & Minifigs operations manual are the most ordinary chapters in the book: how to face a shelf, where to put a price tag, what an employee may wear, and how to sort bricks. That is why they are worth reading. They are where you can see how far down the control goes, in a business every owner must declare, on every email, they “independently” own and operate. The store is arranged to labeled “Ideal/Acceptable/Unacceptable” diagrams, the BAM price tag is mandatory, the dress code reaches the shoes and the fragrance, and the manual instructs staff to know what is missing from a used set, answer honestly if asked, but “do not write down what is missing on the price tag” because a written note gives the customer “grounds to complain.”
The public-relations firm now answering press questions for Bricks & Minifigs is Cookerly Public Relations, an Atlanta agency, a fact this site can state because Cookerly’s own senior vice president stated it, in an email obtained by this site: “I’m on the media relations team for Bricks & Minifigs.” For twenty-five years, in its own words on its own website, the firm has specialized in defeating organized opposition to unpopular clients: for a hazardous-waste incinerator it fought “against Greenpeace and the Clinton administration”; for a coal plant it set about “countering” the “groups opposed to coal power generation and mining”; and a mining company’s defense of a strip mine near the Okefenokee reached the Washington Post “in an email passed through an Atlanta-based firm called Cookerly Public Relations.”
In 2008 Mark Comer published a 300-page account of his business life. It tells the story of iMall five times without once naming the Federal Trade Commission, the lawsuit, or the lifetime ban; it describes the business he built there not as a website but as a machine he can point at any product; and it names, as the friend he started his first band with, a David Gibb, who ran iMall’s sales for five years and is a vice president of Legally Mine today. His own website still put the sale at “$560 million” as recently as 2024, a figure in no SEC filing.
There is a federal law, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, about collecting personal information from children online, and Bricks & Minifigs knows it by name: it wrote an “Age Verification & COPPA Compliance” section into the rules of one of its sweepstakes. It did not write one for the rewards club that records a birthday, for the birthday parties it books for five-year-olds, or into the store privacy policy, which tells the reader the website is “not intended for children under 13” even as the company’s own operations manual plans for “a lot of children in our stores.”
In November 1998 Mark Comer signed a federal consent judgment promising never again to misrepresent what a buyer could earn. In March 1999, the month the FTC approved it, iMall’s own annual report records him buying the Seminar Division, about 95 percent of the company’s revenue, back out of the company for $333,000 paid in iMall stock. The executed order, obtained under FOIA and posted in full, carries two bars with no expiration and no industry limit: violating the Franchise Rule “as it may hereinafter be amended,” and misrepresenting “any fact material to a consumer’s decision to purchase any service or product.” This spring the Legally Mine brand this site reports on moved to his company, the last of three steps already on the site’s own pages: lend, sponsor, capture.
BAM sent this site what appears to be a legal threat: a copyright demand, from “BAM Franchising, Inc. and/or the applicable BAM entity that owns the copyrighted materials,” to take down dozens of its own pages and hand over the names of the people who supplied them. It arrived unsigned, from a general “Bricks & Minifigs Legal Team” address, through the site’s own corrections form, and it is not clear it is even a real legal demand. Reproduced here in full, the letter authenticates as BAM’s own the very materials this site reports on, while the public record shows BAM has never registered the copyright it would need to compel a single name. The demand for names will not be answered.
On July 26 the satirical asset-protection firm Legally Mime demanded this site fall silent, citing its trademark action against this site, Case ID #BAM-404. The citation appears in no reporter, no docket, and no citator, which required a new grade. Each doctrine the firm mimes, the invisible vault, the non-Euclidean trust, the wall, the revenge clause, is reviewed against controlling authority beside the extant version it shadows, from a recorded seminar that sells the box to a company renamed “LM OLDCO” a week before its name moved, and a decree that already made one of the two firms unavailable in Ohio. The demand is declined.
Section 9 of the Bricks & Minifigs operations manual is titled The Daily Store Operations, and most of it is ordinary: open the store, refill the soap, count the register. It is also the chapter where the franchisor keeps a corporate administrator on every store’s social accounts on pain of losing the franchise, bars owners from building their own websites, and runs every card swipe and gift card in the system down one mandated processor the company has, on its own filings, taken 15 to 30 percent of. By the company’s own audited numbers, the money customers have prepaid into that one gift-card system now exceeds its entire negative net worth.
Two weeks after the third U-Haul ran two round trips between the two Oregon stores, Brandon Best’s Eugene store advertised its biggest used-set sale of the year. In the store’s own Small Business Saturday flyer, the party room would be “packed with used sets,” discounted 10% rising to 40% through the day, with bulk tables half off; its video reel ends on the storefront, “780 Blair Blvd.” This is the store where, per the Keizer file, Bryan Mansell’s consigned collection was catalogued in a single Dec 23–24 sitting of twenty-three used Star Wars sets and carries the copy-count fingerprint of one collection. The store’s own video and flyer are on the page; nothing here claims this sale moved his specific copies.
One year and a day after the Keizer takeover, another U-Haul went out from a Eugene storage lot at 12:19 in the morning. The renter estimated 140 miles, one round trip between the two Oregon stores; the paid invoice, $504.68, works out to about 305 miles, two round trips. In the middle of that two-day window, a customer at the Keizer counter recorded the man with the big truck and asked who he was. He told her he’d been “at Eugene earlier today.” A minute later a store employee answered plainly: that’s the owner: he owns this store and the Eugene one, he lives in Utah, and he’s here because of “all the stuff going on.” BAM’s own disclosure names one man as operator of both stores.
Sections 7 and 8 of the Bricks & Minifigs operations manual are titled Safety & Quality Control and BAM Customers. The customer chapter maps the people who come in to sell their LEGO by the adult beside them: the father who is “all about the money,” the mother whose attachment to her child’s collection is a “roadblock” with a printed way around it, the grandmother handed back one remembered piece while the store buys the rest. Children are “the conduit to the parents.” A scripted selling point is annotated “Trade-bait.” And the reseller who counter-offers, who tells a seller they will pay more than the store, is met with “zero tolerance” and kicked out “as nicely as you can.” By the book, the only number a seller hears inside the store is the store’s.
The sixth chapter of the Bricks & Minifigs operations manual is titled Customer Service. Its scripts tell staff to steer every seller into store credit that can only be spent back at the company, to quote a buy price as a fraction of what the company will resell the item for, and to withhold any figure until the goods are in the store’s hands. Its complaint policy, which calls itself “not punitive,” ends by making customer complaints, counted by the company at its sole discretion, grounds to lose the franchise. And it keeps a named file on every customer who complains.
Ammon McNeff, the chief executive of Bricks & Minifigs, was asked on a podcast to name his single greatest strength. He answered that he tends “to not see people as humans” but as “output machines.” The episode is hosted by the co-founder of Morrow Hill, the real estate firm his franchise recommends to new owners and does not name in its disclosure document. In the same fifty-seven minutes the owners described, in their own recorded voice, how they screen franchisees, how people “expire,” how they acquired the company, and a new direct LEGO supply line.
Item 10 of the Bricks & Minifigs disclosure document is two sentences and three denials: no direct or indirect financing, no assistance in providing financing, no guarantees. The company’s own operations manual, in the chapter titled Investment and Financing, says owners hit tough times and that the franchise “has developed relationships with many quality providers” for their needs, and adds that the company has watched its own owners borrow into personal financial harm. The manual is dated October 6, 2024. The filing repeating “do not assist in providing financing” was issued March 31, 2025, one hundred seventy-six days later.
Page 35 of the Bricks & Minifigs operations manual, in the chapter that defines every owner’s financial obligations, contains a sentence no employee wrote to a franchisee: “Certainly! Here are the extended ‘Financial Planning and Budgeting’ sections, including the specific areas requested. Each section is written at a 9th-grade reading level.” An AI chatbot’s reply, pasted into the binding text with its greeting still attached, in the document whose cover makes any departure from policy a breach of the franchise agreement. The same sections lock owners out of their own social accounts until the company certifies them, describe twice-yearly inspections as guaranteeing compliance, mandate the chart of accounts, and collect fees by standing debit from the owner’s bank account, where any other arrangement is itself a breach.
Every Bricks & Minifigs franchisee must sign each email with a sentence stating they independently own and operate their store. The manual that requires it also names the only four ways they may contact the company, assigns the address they must use, reserves the company’s right to read it, and forbids owners from discussing company policy with one another in public.
BAM’s 2025 franchise disclosure document tells prospective owners that the company provides “suggested prices” and that a franchisee “may not need to follow or maintain any sales price.” Attached to that same filing, as Exhibit E, is the operations manual’s table of contents. It names a section called Standardized Pricing Policies. It also reports that seven consecutive chapters each begin on page 1.
A Bricks & Minifigs franchisee builds the store to the company’s specifications, buys from suppliers the company designates, and purchases every branded item from the company itself. The franchise agreement in the public court record reserves the company’s right to collect rebates from those designated suppliers and to keep all of them, “without obligation to share or remit any portion” to the franchisee who paid for the buildout. Item 8 of the disclosure document denies that any affiliate takes revenue on required purchases, a denial scoped to affiliates and to required purchases, which is neither the franchisor itself nor the construction and fixturing the contract reserves. The one line that is disclosed, BAM selling branded goods to its own franchisees, grew from $33,562 in 2016 to $1,362,791 in 2025. The suppliers the directory routes stores to are set out in full: the collectible stock, and also the display cases, the signage, the fixtures, the branded cups and candy, the uniforms and the print.
Suing a franchisee who had rebranded his stores, BAM filed a competitor’s marketing email forwarded to its chief executive with the note “Since I shop there, I get their marketing emails,” and blacked out the sender. It covered exactly the three fields that name him and left its own chief executive and the competitor in the clear, and the words under the boxes were never deleted. The sender is BAM’s own chief technology officer, who by BAM’s own disclosure also owns a Bricks & Minifigs store.
Bricks & Minifigs runs an online help desk for its franchisees at bamfran.freshdesk.com, and it requires no login. Its fifty-two articles are the operating instructions the company gives a store owner: the point-of-sale system every store is required to buy, which vendors to use, and how to run and advertise the store’s website. The portal was captured in full on July 23, 2026, and a format-preserving copy is kept here.
Bricks & Minifigs requires every franchisee to buy the point-of-sale system the company specifies, pay a monthly fee to run it, connect it to the company’s central computers, and let the company read the data. The company’s own store-management system, which needs no login, records which instance each store runs on: of the 191 stores it tracks, 158, about 83 percent, sit on one shared instance. All 309 locations are now on a single map, each one carrying the company’s own record for that store beside the operator and property owner named in the public registries, with a link to the government page every entry came from.
The corporations behind the Keizer and Eugene stores, the ones with Brandon Best’s name on them, are dead in Oregon’s registry, and neither ever filed an annual report. What replaced them are two LLCs that name no franchisee, both run from BAM’s own Provo suite line: BAMFSALEM, one fused word that reads as BAM Franchising, Salem, and which a word search of the registry does not return, and Willamette Forest Ops, whose members are Matthew McNeff and BAM Franchising itself. The franchisor holds member equity at the store where the seized collection has been reselling, and the founding papers of both replacement entities were organized from BAM’s own address and signed, under penalty of perjury, by the chief financial officer’s son. The full clock, six planes on one timeline, with every registry page and both Articles of Organization linked and retrieved live.
The second U-Haul followed the trucks; this follows the storage. A reviewer signed “Brandon B” left public U-Haul reviews at three Oregon self-storage facilities across the year of the takeover: a move-in in Salem in May 2024, a one-star close-out in Eugene in January 2025 at the same River Road lot that rented Best the October truck, and a third in Gresham. The reviews are reproduced from U-Haul’s own pages and put the man in rented storage, in the right places, in the right months. What was in the units, they do not say.
Bricks & Minifigs explained the takeover-night U-Haul by pointing to a different U-Haul, from October, that it said carried a different franchisee’s inventory. It never showed that receipt. This site has it now. Brandon Best rented both trucks on his own account, three weeks apart, and on the odometer they are the same trip: 186 miles on November 14, about 180 on October 24, each a Salem round trip out of Eugene. The CEO’s camper account is quoted from the video with timestamps, and the November receipt rents nothing to tow a camper with.
A Bricks & Minifigs “Brand Review” deck, version 3.0.0 dated April 15, 2022, that the company’s own eight-step onboarding shows a prospect only after they sign a confidentiality agreement, was sitting publicly on the company’s own web infrastructure, with no login and nothing to sign. It hands prospective owners an outside firm to run their real estate “at no extra cost” and an outside company to arrange their money, and introduces both before the Franchise Disclosure Document is ever delivered. The full 21-slide deck is posted.
Three Utah charities share one control group and one office suite. On their own tax returns, a foundation for underprivileged children sent 77 percent of its program money into a sister charity that paid about thirty-one BYU football players in amounts that match no tuition bill, then swore the recipients were “various local non-profit organizations.” The biggest year has no public return at all, and the golf that raised the money was sold to sponsors as help for children, priced per child.
Legally Mine sells structures marketed to put property beyond the reach of creditors. Its own operating agreement is public, filed in court by its own founder: charging-order-only walls, a clause voiding transfers to a judgment debtor by name, a distribution tap the members may shut, and a no-court arbitration door a judge described from the bench before dismissing the case into it. The exhibit is two agreements spliced together, and the version that governs, the one with the 79/11/10 split, is the one nobody notarized. The record is public; the machinery it describes is built to leave none. What Utah law does with each wall is linked.
On February 25, 2025, a USPTO examining attorney refused to register BRICKS & MINIFIGS because the name is generic, and the most damaging evidence attached was the company’s own storefronts. Across fifteen years of its own filings, the company has disclaimed every word in its name, one word at a time.
Two of Bricks & Minifigs’ own posts about the Salem store were rewritten after publication. The May 21 note was expanded the day after the company filed it in court, adding the backbone of its defense to a post dated weeks earlier. The June 4 timeline the company calls “official” was revised four times, unmarked, on names and dates, and now dates the consignment agreement to October 2023 while the agreement BAM itself filed says November 22. The company marked one edit for “clarity” and left the other four unmarked. Both comparisons are public on the Internet Archive; the update links them so any reader can check.
When you sell your LEGO to a Bricks & Minifigs store you see one number, the offer, with no way to check it. This page is the check: what a set really sells for, beside what BAM stores charge for the same set on their own websites, for hundreds of sets, searchable. Typical markup: 23 percent. The biggest gaps top 150. And the flip is in BAM’s own filing: its stores keep about 62 cents of every sales dollar, by its own disclosed margins. Star Wars, the category of the vanished Mansell consignment, carries an extra premium, and at the Eugene store the newer the listing, the bigger the markup.
The man BAM presents as an arm’s-length buyer, and whose police complaint opened the American Fork file, is six public records from Joseph Smith’s household: two of his third-great-grandaunts were Smith’s plural wives, making him the Prophet’s grandnephew by marriage twice over, and his third-great-grandfather held Smith’s power of attorney and sat on his Council of Fifty. On the police department’s own bodycam, the complainant adds the present tense himself: “I’m on my high council.” Every rung of the line is public, and the post walks them.
The report that opened the police file says the YouTuber’s car was stopped for running a stop sign. The officer’s own dash camera recorded the moment: the car brakes, stops at the sign for about two seconds, and turns right. The pavement has no stop line at all. And the patrol car’s own GPS rolled past the same sign at about five miles per hour. The full exhibit, the method, and the legal stakes, honestly bounded, are in the post.
BAM Franchising’s own disclosure documents put its legal home in Oregon, then promise a move to Utah that no edition ever records as completed, then place it in Delaware, whose own records now show that company delinquent on its franchise tax. This month a same-name Utah corporation appeared, filed by a hand the public record does not identify.
Fourteen minutes after a judge signed the search warrant, a lieutenant opened the chief of police’s contact card and called him: “Five in custody.” The department’s own body cameras recorded the call from two angles, and his phone screen is reconstructed frame by frame. All three are placed on one clock.
The Franchise Disclosure Document is the filing a franchisor must give every buyer before they spend their savings. This site has now read the whole thing, Item by Item, across five editions, each claim set beside the company’s own second author. The full walk is on one page.
BAM’s disclosure document, issued March 31, 2023, tells prospective franchisees the company does not offer financing, directly or indirectly. BAM’s own verified complaint describes the signed Security Agreement it took on the Salem store purchase fifty-seven days earlier, and its CEO swore the complaint is true. Both documents are hosted in excerpt.
On May 21 the consignment was “expressly prohibited” by the franchise agreements. On June 4 it had “never been part of” them. On June 13, one day after the agreement page aired on screen, it became “never approved.” On July 10 the claim was gone. No correction was ever posted, and the June 4 version is still live.
Three years after 60 Minutes aired a whistleblower’s account of the LDS Church’s investment fund, the checkable record has caught up with it: a federal consent order, a unanimous en banc appellate ruling, and the fund’s own public tax returns. The segment is posted and explained first, then audited row by row. It holds up nearly everywhere a record exists; one comparison fails arithmetic, one question was later answered in the church’s favor by eleven federal judges, and the claims that cannot be checked share one feature: the filing that would test them is not required to exist. A standalone verification exercise, unrelated to the franchise reporting on this site.
The company put its evidence against the journalist on screen in its own video: “two witness testimonies.” Both are now public. One man overheard grievances in a smoke shop; the other opened his office door and answered a question. The word “extortion” appears in neither. It is added afterward, by lawyers and by the detective, on the charge that was never filed.
Twenty-six emails between the defendant and the American Fork records office, typed out in full. He paid $1,836.15 on April 2 for the bodycam of his four cases. The office consulted the prosecuting attorneys, withheld the complainant’s statements, froze the whole request when he appealed, and twice promised “end of the week.” On May 29 the department published the footage to the world.
Bricks & Minifigs answered its critics. Checked claim by claim against its own filings, most of the statement is true, and the true parts are admissions of what critics described. The one place it leaves the record is the court order it thanks the judge for.
Provo Police recorded a phone greeting for the Bricks & Minifigs case alone, telling callers the department cannot discuss it. On a forensic comparison of the voices, the woman who reads it matches Detective Medina Dore, the detective who swore the secret Google warrant, at a probability on the order of 96 percent.
By his own public LinkedIn, BAM Franchising’s chief financial officer holds three chief titles at the same time: CFO of BAM, CEO of a Boise resale store he co-owns, and CFO of a separate investment company. For two years he held four. Drawn to scale, from his own record.
The content-bar order is being replaced by a conduct-only injunction. Read from its four corners and from Rule 65(d), it binds a narrow, named circle: the four defendants and their agents, and, only with actual notice, anyone shown to act in active concert. It does not reach the audience, the press, or the platforms.
BAM called the buyers of the store it seized independent franchise owners. On BAM’s own sworn filings they are its own franchise recruiter and the contractor it hired to inventory the repossession, running three “Baker Bricks” companies bound by one nominee agent, one Utah PO box, and a parent LLC that names them both.
A Provo detective swore out a secret warrant for the Google account and YouTube channel behind “Reckless Ben,” on a theory of extortion, and had Google gagged for ninety days. Those charges were never filed; the case that followed is two misdemeanors.
The officer whose name stands behind BAM’s audited numbers is a career finance executive, and, by every public identifier, the accountant the SEC censured in 1992 over an audit whose going-concern qualification was removed before it reached the Commission.
Chief Magistrate Judge Romero signed three orders the same afternoon: responses due August 3, Oregon counsel admitted, the scheduling clock running. The agreed injunction still waits for District Judge Barlow.
The June 30 agreement drops the speech restrictions outright, and it sat unsigned because a magistrate judge lacked authority to enter it. On July 6 the case was reassigned to District Judge David B. Barlow.
Item 3 certifies no litigation; Note 10 of the same filing records pending legal actions. Tested against the materiality defense and the no-private-right objection, the contradiction stands, and state law supplies the private claim.
The prevention doctrine, the seller-financed note’s weak points, the fraud discovery clock, the arbitration clause’s limits, and Utah’s pattern statute, each with the controlling authority linked. General information about the law, not legal advice.
Four troubles in four places, assembled for the first time as one enterprise running one pattern against four classes of victim. The through-line is the enterprise’s own filings; nothing is adjudicated and everyone named is presumed innocent.
Three funders identified behind a filing agent’s mask, and the whole 2025 lien stack released in one window, the same month the brand moved to a new shell.
The takedown flag cited “non-public information.” The flagged content was a public UCC-1 financing statement, a document whose entire legal purpose is to be seen.
A franchisee and an elderly co-owner sued; one sentence in the franchise agreement sent every claim, elder abuse included, into confidential arbitration. The allegations are unadjudicated.
Reporting a shot-out window, McNeff tells the officer his son “wouldn’t have the company if not for the million and a half dollars I gave to him.” Secondhand-sourced; nothing here is adjudicated.
One framework, four scenarios that must not be read together: a dead mirror-image count, a live civil path for a defrauded franchisee, a criminal referral, and a hedged path for a silenced journalist. Analysis, not accusation.
BAM’s own audited numbers meet three of four going-concern tests outright, while 55 buyers paid $40,000 each on an Item 3 that said no litigation needed disclosing.
Legally Mine issued a public statement claiming no involvement with Bricks and Minifigs and no connection since January 2021. Checked line by line against the filings: four of five load-bearing claims are refuted by a specific public document, one holds, and the statement was posted from the operation's own headquarters.
The ex parte order that once directed Ben Schneider to pull his videos is being replaced. In a joint stipulation, both sides asked the court to convert it into a conduct-only preliminary injunction that leaves the journalism expressly protected. No bond, the parties agreed to mediate, and the case is now in federal court.
An update to The BAM Map.
An update to The BAM Map.
An update to The BAM Map.
The lawyer who sued Reckless Ben for connecting BAM to Legally Mine is, on the court’s own record, the lawyer for both.
Doe defendants alone cannot defeat diversity; the lever is joining the real, nondiverse person behind a Doe, and even then it is the judge’s discretion, not a right. The franchisor is reported to be reaching for that device.
Four houses deeded to Evelyn McNeff as the sons prepared to sue, all four notarized defectively by the family’s own notary, then cured and re-recorded once the suit was gone. The before-and-after on all four, side by side.
The highest-yield play is the federal tax one, the IRS promoter penalty and a whistleblower submission, with no limitations clock on the assessment. Six new names join the connection board.
The American Fork City records specialist who processes records requests and produces the redacted bodycam releases shares a household with an American Fork PD sergeant; the two have co-owned one American Fork residential parcel since 2020. A position conflict, not a claim that she touched any specific redaction.
Every McNeff-family deed was notarized by an insider; none of the arm’s-length transfers were. The asset-protection method has a documented professional lineage, and a Mitton-lineage law firm sits a few blocks away on the same shell cluster. And the city records desk that releases the footage shares a household with a sworn officer.
The officers named in the raid and the related stops are public employees with no tie to the McNeff or Legally Mine business filings, and a prior federal excessive-force suit names the same lieutenant, with the same camera-concealment the Schneider bodycam shows.
Legally Mine’s captive Alaska agent names Deborah Rogers as its registered agent. She died in January 2024, yet a December 2025 filing still certifies her under penalty of perjury, and she was the founder’s high-school classmate.
Four Orem homes quitclaimed to Evelyn McNeff in one back-to-back batch, about ten days before the sons sued in federal court; rotated again into Tolkien-named shells in 2023.
BAM’s own franchise disclosure lists Joshua Johnson in three roles at once: BAM recruiter, Fortune Law EVP, and Legally Mine event director.
One thing is already adjudicated, one is class-action-ready, one is documented, one is still being tested, and two are tips for investigators.
Ben Schneider, the YouTuber met with a racketeering suit, a gag order and an arrest, is represented by counsel and backed by a public legal-defense fund.
The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; the criminal charges referenced are unadjudicated and every defendant is presumed innocent. Sources are linked so readers can check the record. · Home · Map · The law · Bodycam