How do pawnbrokers verify that the item pawned is not stolen?
I am a pawnbroker and yes we do have good legal representation. Your stereotypical "Hollywood," view of a pawnshop is not reality anymore. Many pawn stores have been heavily upgraded with more retail friendly looks. One need only walk into some of the big chain pawn stores and you can see for yourself. We have no way of knowing if an item is stolen. We all do our best to weed out goods we think may be stolen. We do this by asking the customer questions about the item. An example: If a customer comes in with a gibson deluxe accoustic guitar we will ask the customer to play something for us. If they can't play a song then that is a red flag the guitar may not be theirs. Another example: 22 year old white kid comes in with an iphone and no charger with it. We look into the iphone and see a picture of a nice black family in it and the device is registered to a woman named Michelle Obama then obviously the phone is not his. Also if a customer tells us something like "Hey I wanna sell this off the books," then we tell the customer to get lost and may even call the police on them. Also alot of states and cities mandate that their pawnshops report everything they take in through police database systems like leadsonline or BWIrapid. Pawnshops do not want to take in stolen merchandise it is a cost to us when police seize the item and we may have court costs to incur should we want to try and get the item back. We do our best to try and ascertain whether the item truly belongs to the person in front of us. Statistically - nationally less than .10% of merchandise in pawnshops are seized as stolen. That is incredibly low. If you are a criminal and you are trying to sell stolen merchandise to a pawnshop you are a complete idiot because you will get caught. It's like raising your hand saying "I did it." The police will get a look at the item and we will often provide the police with a copy of your id, video surveillance of you in our store, and in some states they may even get your fingerprints if the state requires people to be fingerprinted before selling merchandise. Truth is most of the criminals are selling their stolen wares online, at parking lot swap meets, hotels, back alley deals etc.