You might also check Craigslist for your current location. Also, around here on Facebook we have several local online garage sale sites, where people post used goods for sale.
If it were me I would be calling the police every day, until they finally starting checking pawn shops. I would be pissed.
How does buying “in good faith” differ from receiving? Naturally any buyer of stolen property will claim that they were unaware of that.
In the UK, a buyer in this position will lose. An employee of mine bought a car, for which he had to borrow the money. A few weeks later the police knocked on his door and asked for the keys - the car had been stolen by a third party and sold on twice. he lost the car and still had to pay the finance company. He could have taken the guy he bought it from to the small claims court to try to get something back, but the guy had no assets so was not worth pursuing.
If I found and positively identified my property in a shop, I would be able to recover it. They may well not just hand it over if it was valuable, but with a police report and receipts, I would get them back.
Willoughby / Lake County.
If they can’t give me the info, can they take my information and call the police about it? On the sheet I’m giving them, I’m giving them item descriptions/serial numbers and also an incident report with the WPD. It seems ridiculous that they could know they have my camera in back, and blow me off.
When you say “local police”, does that mean the city they’re in? Two pawnbrokers told me they don’t submit routine reports. The one who told me they did submitted it to the county sheriff, but I assume that’s because they’re in painesville township, not a proper city.
There’s only one pawn shop in Willoughby and the police did talk to them. But do I need to file a separate report for all of the surrounding cities in case pawn shops in those cities sent something out? You would think they’d automatically talk to each other about that sort of stuff, otherwise you can bypass the whole system by going one city over to sell your gear.
Got another e-mail from the officer handling my case. He said they don’t send out faxes to pawn shops anymore because they don’t get results, and that he can only go to the one in the actual city here because he’s a patrol officer. He said cases referred to the detective bureau wouldn’t really be able to do more than that. But they must. They could make calls to other cities at least. Check submission lists from pawn shops. They’re not doing any of that. I’m not sure if I can call other cities and have them check myself or if I’d have to file a new statement with every one. I guess I’ll call around and find out tonight.
The difference is that a legitimate business(in the US–I assume you’re from the UK?) buys from someone off the street , makes them show ID, copies that ID, fills out a state mandated form, and submits the info to the police(in many/most jurisdictions in the US). Then we hold the merchandise for a proscribed period of time.
As you would in most jurisdictions in the US. You just might have to reimburse the pawn show what he paid. Not necessarily a bad deal to pay $100 to get back your $1000. item.