It was a week after I'd established my swap shop in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and things had been going surprisingly well. After testing it with friends I'd opened my island up to the wider community via dodo code, and most people were behaving. Guests were swapping out unwanted items and finding new trinkets to take home, with many showing stunning generosity and sending kind messages. There were a couple who stretched the rules by leaving flowers or a single iron nugget, but I was willing to forgive them (particularly given someone had donated 300k bells to cover costs). Demand had grown so great, in fact, that I'd even set up a swap shop Twitter account just to manage all the requests to visit.
And then, as always, someone tried to ruin it all.
I was minding my own business managing the shop when, glancing down from my Nook phone, I noticed a mysterious absence of fruit in one section of the shop. Maybe someone was swapping out a lot of fruit at once? Odd. Putting my phone away, I saw that half the items in the swap shop had vanished - and the culprit was mid-way through hoovering up the remaining goods. They clearly had no intention of swapping anything, and were well on their way to simply clearing out the stock.