Race against time to stop 'Bad Lego'

Toy makers are racing to dismantle criminal gangs selling 'Bad Lego' – construction kits that allow aficionados to build upsetting scenes or to recreate terrible events from Lego bricks. Investigators have recovered, for example, kits to build the executions by guillotine during the French Revolution, a model of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and a scale model of Epstein island.

Denmark's Lego sales help it to avoid having to sell Greenland to Orange Face.

'Lego bricks are supposed to be a positive way to stimulate children's imagination,' said a spokesman. 'Bad Lego threatens all of that. It upsets our customers and damages the brand.'

'Bad Lego isn't new. People shared their perverted work on bulletin boards in the eighties. At the start, it was naive stuff, like making Hitler's face out of black and white bricks – not much different from typing it out with X and O characters. But now it's very sophisticated. We found real Lego pirates from a Peter Pan set had been repurposed in an unauthorised 'Somali pirates' set. And the packaging was convincing and looked authentic. People are making a lot of money out of this, and it's not us.'

'Many custom scenes are made for, and bought by, dictators, drug lords and crime bosses. It's considered a mark of success if you can ask your fellow crims round to see your Alien Chest Burst Lego display, or debauched scenes at Royal Lodge, or a reconstruction of the Novichok poisoning in Salisbury. We've even found a Dark Lego Superstore on the dark web – their slogan is 'Everything is Awful'. That's a copyright violation right there.

'So we're asking people not to buy unauthorised Lego sets. And we're working with online sellers to close down this evil trade. We want to return Lego to its right place – selling £200 Lego sets to overprivileged kids who get too much pocket money.'

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