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Now, let me begin by saying: stealing is bad. I don’t think you should steal things. It is a good way to get yourself sent to prison and it is morally wrong to take things that don’t belong to you. Cargo theft? Bad. Stealing priceless artworks from museums where they could be enjoyed by everyone? Bad.

And yet. And yet.

Last week, thieves made off with 12 tons of KitKats from a truck in Italy, while there was another art heist to follow the literal daylight robbery that occurred at the Louvre in Paris last year: this time, Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse paintings were stolen from a museum in northern Italy. These stories reliably go viral and prompt delightful phrases such as “major candy crime” in this very newspaper. And they go viral not, for the most part, because people are outraged, but because they find something thrilling about heists.

I don’t have to lose any sleep over the victims of the KitKat crime. Sure, cargo theft: sounds reprehensible, doesn’t it? But a gigantic company such as Nestlé will be fine and, in any case, one in the eye for Nestlé seems less unacceptable given the company’s, shall we say, contested business practices. They don’t seem terribly fussed about it, either – it’s even worked as a nice bit of PR. Their official statement began: “We’ve always encouraged people to have a break with KitKat, but it seems thieves have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 tons of our chocolate.” They have even launched a stolen KitKat tracker, on April Fools’ Day, no less.

What is it about these heists that people like, as long as nobody gets hurt? Theft more broadly doesn’t tend to prompt glee. I do not wish well the person who broke into my house last year and stole my laptop. I would happily see them have to read through the reams of abominable drafts I kept on there as punishment, eyes clamped open Clockwork Orange-style. But if I read about a masked man breaking into an art museum and making off into the night with an exceptionally valuable painting of some fish under his arm, a part of me thinks: good for you.

The appeal of the KitKat heist is relatively easy to figure out. Somebody going to all that trouble to pilfer 12 tons of chocolate, in the shape of race cars no less, is a funny idea. God knows what the thieves plan to do with such a monstrous amount of really quite distinctive chocolate bars, which can in any case be traced by product codes if they end up back on the market.

But what about other heists? I’m sure part of it is just something as brainless as “they do it in da movies”. I colour the scene in my mind with some The Thomas Crown Affair-style glamour, when I’m sure the reality was something lower rent and grubbier, and that Pierce Brosnan wasn’t even there. I also appreciate the brazenness of it on some level. In a similar sort of way, if a gull takes my sandwich, I think: rats, I wanted to eat that, but fair play to you for putting it all on the line by swooping in for it. Boldness has its own kind of glory.

I think there’s something more to it, though. I feel like someone is trying to steal money from me online practically every day: dubious text messages from companies I’ve never heard of, telling me that I have won hundreds of pounds if I would only be so kind as to click a link. Data theft is seemingly happening to all of us all the time through leaks we don’t even hear about.

There is something winningly analogue about people seizing things out of the real world, getting away with a physical object as a result of a detailed, well-executed operation. These crimes belong to the realm of the tangible. It is probably an indictment of how modern life feels that I look at a high-profile, audacious theft and think, well, at least they did it in person! But there it is. I will continue to take a sort of amoral pleasure in these stories. I hope there is a den of thieves somewhere in the Dolomites having to decide what to do with more than 400,000 chocolate racing cars before they melt.

And I do hope the galleries get their artworks back, sure. But there is a thrill in remembering that those priceless objects behind the velvet ropes are, ultimately, just objects that you could reach out and take, if you only had the wherewithal, and the sheer balls, to do it.

Once again, however: do not steal things.

• Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist