July 22, 2025

Green Day's Cigarettes and Valentines Stolen Album Caper | 45

35 minutes

Theft is rampant in the music world, and it takes many forms. Musicians regularly deal with stolen gear…guitars disappearing from stages, rehearsal spaces being robbed, or entire vans being emptied. These losses hurt, but they’re tangible…physical items taken by

force or opportunity.

Then there’s the more invisible kind of theft…the kind that bleeds artists

financially. Fraud, embezzlement, and dodgy managers can silently drain income. In today’s digital age, streaming fraud has emerged as a new threat, with royalties being diverted through suspicious tactics. Identity theft, stolen song credits, and outright plagiarism all fall into this category, along with illegal file sharing and bootlegging from inside CD factories.

But the rarest and most cinematic form of music theft? Stealing the recordings themselves right from the source, at the recording studio.

Such a theft like this should be entirely impossible, yet this is what Green Day says happened to an album they were working on called “Cigarettes and Valentines”. They went into work on the record one day, and the tapes were just…gone!

Green Day has always insisted that these tapes were stolen. However, there was never any police investigation, no suspects were named, and no trace of the tapes or the music contained has ever been found anywhere outside official channels.

This is episode 45 of “Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry”… the real story behind Green Day’s stolen “Cigarettes

and Valentines” album.

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