Nintendo Confirms the Leak Nintendo Switch Pre-Order was Stolen

Just a few days ago, we posted here a video from FLU-KO of the world’s first unboxing video of Nintendo Switch and a guy named hiphoptherobot claimed his Nintendo Switch unit was shipped early accidentally by an unnamed store. We’ll, the whole story turns out it’s not true as Nintendo confirms that the unit was stolen from a distributor by an employee and Nintendo are currently investigating the situation.

Here is the official statement of Nintendo representative from IGN:

“Earlier this week, individuals claimed to prematurely purchase a small number of Nintendo Switch systems from an unspecified retailer. Nintendo has determined these units were stolen in an isolated incident by employees of a U.S. distributor, with one system being illegally resold. The individuals involved have been identified, terminated from their place of employment and are under investigation by local law enforcement authorities on criminal charges.
Nintendo Switch will launch worldwide on March 3, 2017, and we look forward to everyone being able to discover the wonders of the new system for themselves at that time.”

In regards of hiphoptherobot, it seems he bought a stolen Nintendo Switch from a person and not really an early shipped product, see his response below.

Well I am a barista and we dont usually carry Nintendo products at the cafe. And I am sure it is frustrating that I cant share more details but I am not sure what I can or cant share. For the sake of clarification I will say that I don’t think the person I got it from knew and therefore I certainly didn’t know but somewhere down the chain some switches had “mysteriously disappeared”. So while it was unknown to me, once I found out that it had probably been stolen I did’t feel comfortable keeping it.

Apparently, hiphoptherobot also tries to sell the Nintendo Switch at reddit.com/r/GameSale/comments/5uhe77/usah_nintendo_switch_w_paypal/

This whole story just proved that Nintendo Ninja’s are not sleeping protecting its product from people trying to take advantage with their product, so you should never underestimate Nintendo Ninja’s.