EB Demands Payment From Victim of Theft

blincoln writes "ABC Action News is reporting that a Florida Electronics Boutique bought stolen games and gaming hardware, and made a profit on selling them back to their rightful owner, refusing to return the merchandise unless she paid them. From the article: 'EB Games still insists it will not refund Michelle's money. If she wants her money back, the company said, she can go through the legal system and get restitution from the thief.' In addition, EB appears to be violating the law by re-selling used merchandise without holding it for the required number of days. I was under the impression that purchasers of stolen merchandise could expect it to be seized by the police (who would return it to the owner) and not recover any of the money they spent buying it unless they took action against the thief. Is that not the case in Florida?"

Comments

issue?

[cft]

how is this even an issue? the law clearly states that they must hold the goods for a certain amount of time (10 days
if I'm not mistaken before they're given away. The article says she went to the store after two days and they had already
sold her playstation. They clearly violated law and should be reported to the authorities, not the manager as she did.

Re:issue?

[bloodrose]

Sometimes calling the police isn't feasible. On many things, such as small claims like this, the police will require some level of proof before they move on it. In some cases, gathering a minor amount of proof and taking EB to small claims court would be a better route. At least, it seems that way to me.

Re:issue?

[metlin]

Looks like you have not read the article in full, its 15 days actually :-)

From the article -

Under state law, all merchants who deal in secondhand goods are required to hold those goods for 15 calendar days before selling them. The law is designed specifically to prevent the sale of stolen goods, and prevent situations like this.

Well, you cannot blame her for not reporting it to the authorities - usually you end up going to the authorities only as a last resort. You try and solve problems as best as you can before that with the company and if that does not work out, you see restitution.

But now that its out in the open, it may turn quite interesting.

Re:issue?

[LostCluster]

Actually, a court is only supposed to resolve disuptes into who owns an item. Once a court certifies that this woman owns what she says she owns, it then falls back onto the police to do the strongarming.

Re:issue?

[bleh-of-the-huns]

Not true, the police are supposed to seize stolen goods as evidence, and then the goods get returned to the original owner, and its up to EB to attempt to get their money back from the thief if its possible.

More to the point.. what the fuck were they (EB) thinking.. is the bad publicity over this whole incident worth the negligable amount of money to this woman.... I think not, this will cost them alot more in the long run, and I hope the authorities come down hard on EB for violating the laws and this persons rights

Re:issue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes calling the police isn't feasible

Lately, it seems like nothing's feasible. I had a truck broken into last year and $2K of tools and test equipment taken out of it. Response from the police? Leave a message on the answering machine and never, ever expect any followup. "It's an insurance matter."

Some of the equipment was licensed amateur radio gear that was very distinguishable. Checked with pawn shops. They told me to get lost: "We don't have to talk to you or tell you if we have your equipment or not. Only the police can check."

Obviously not if the police don't investigate it and relegate the matter to an answering machine (a friend at the police department said they only use those cases for statistical purposes - e.g. demonstrating they need more funding because of greater crime, though who knows what they'd do with more funds. Obviously not chase ordinary criminals that affect most of us).

Insurance company was no help either? Played "let's demand proof for everything" - and when proof was provided, claimed to lose forms, require reapplication, and then "mistakenly" closed my case twice. Never got paid a cent, though they indicated I had a claim. Recourse? File complaint with state insurance regulators. (Hint: their address is /dev/null).

Now we're dealing with a significant theft and destruction to a federally licensed communication site at work (in a matter that is going on across the country), and the local FBI office won't response. They're pretty busy hanging on Internet chat rooms nabbing perverts - maybe playing on the PC is more fun than doing field work. Local law enforcement says it's a national matter and has no resources to investigate.

Conclusion? Seems like a good time to be a crook or an insurance company. Us poor schmucks are outgunned and unrepresented. How's that "no taxation without representation" line go again?

Re:issue?

[Calmiche]

Let's see this from a Pawnbrokers point of view.

As a pawn broker in Idaho, it's not quite that way here. In Idaho, we are required to hold ANY property for a minimum of 30 days if bought of 60 days if pawned. We also report full descriptions of EVERYTHING that comes over our counter. Serial numbers, distinguishing marks, colors, model numbers, EVERYTHING. We fill our several copies for each pawn/buy and send them to the police twice a week.

Any police officer may place a "Hold" on an item for any reason, which adds another 90 days. They may also extend that hold another 90 days as many times as they wish.

However, as a pawn shop, the authorities try to take us. That is, quite often, a patrolman will come in and demand that we relinquish property, which they intend to give directly back to the person who's property was stolen. Technically this is against the law for them to do, since we bought it in good faith.

We don't take items that we even suspect are stolen. In fact, I turned down a nice mp3 player yesterday because I suspected it was stolen. I couldn't prove anything so I couldn't call the police, but I didn't take it either.

We are always willing to "Hold" an item for as long as is needed, but we require an inventory requisition sheet be filed and that a disposition hearing be held to determine where the property should go.

If we didn't do this, we would have stuff "stolen" from us continually.

There have been several times in the last couple years when someone will come in, write down serial numbers on some of our stock, and then go to the police claiming it was stolen. Most of them are in jail for fraud, and one is awaiting sentancing right now.

This is also why we hate used stores like EB, Hastings, etc.. They don't have any of the same requirements. In fact, I've never seen a city ordinace that adressed pawn shops and second hand stores together. So don't go describing EB as a pawn shop. It isn't.

Your best bet for protection? Always right down serial numbers! It makes it 85% more likely that you will get your property back.

Calmiche,

Re:issue?

[Mr. Slippery]

Sounds like you should vote to raise taxes and hire some more police.

Hmm. There's an old cliche that "A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged." (And, "A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.")

But when the one of the "let's cut taxes!" brand of conservative suddenly finds not enough cops to track down the guy who burgled his house (or worse yet, not enough firefighters to come extinguish his house-b-que, or EMTs to come jumpstart his dad's failing heart)...yeah, you just might see a tax (and service) cutter switch to a tax-and-spend liberal.

(Of course, they might just become one of the new "borrow and spend" conservatives that have become popular lately; "don't tax us, our kids will pay for it." Grand.)

Re:issue?

[deinol]

Stores do this all the time. I had a similar circumstance where I had loaned a friend a large quantity of books. Then I was gone for a few months during the summer. When I got back, I found out that they had sold the books to a used book store in order to pay the rent. They had thought I had moved away for good or something. The book store in question refused to return the books, claiming I had no proof they were mine, despite my name being clearly written in, then marked over (but still legible) in each of the books. 75% had already been sold.

The police couldn't do anything until I pressed charges against the person who stole them. Then they came in and seized the remaining books. 6 months later, they were returned to me.

Suffice it to say, I'm not really friends with that person anymore. But, they did admit to it, and were willing to give the store the money back to get the books back. But the store wouldn't even do that. They wanted to sell them for full price. The remaining books would have cost more than the entire lot was purchased at by the store. In the end, I was more upset with the store than the person. I still won't return to that book store.

Well,

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

time to go hock my neighbor's jewelry at EB!

The hell..?

[Lewis Daggart]

So they buy stolen goods without checking. They dont hold it forthe required 15 days. They then refuse to reimburse the person for the goods they illegally sold. They refuse to return the goods (without pay) that they unknowingly receaved through illegal channels. I was under the impression that in a case like this, EB should be returning the goods and seeking restitution from the thief, while the person who's property was stolen gets their goods back from EB. Of course, I'm no lawyer, but that's only common sense.

Well, EB broke at least one law

[Raleel]

as stated in the article, they didn't hold them for 15 days, specifically designed for preventing this sort of thing.

But isn't there a law on the books about buying stolen goods? I always thought that that was a crime as well.

EB is obviously not looking at the big picture here. They want to recoup the cost of the stuff that they bought. However, a good response here (like giving her her stuff and sucking the loss), is going to win a good customer (this store did the right thing, that's why I purchase from them).

EB should be criminally charged

[dartmouth05]

EB should be criminally charged for dealing in stolen goods. By violating that 15 day law and by refusing to turn over the stolen goods, EB is no longer acting as a retail store--they are acting as a fence.

Regardless of whether or not EB knew the goods were stolen when they purchased them from the thief, they did not not take reasonable precautions to ensure that they weren't stolen, such as follow the 15 day law.

EB's actions were simply reprehensible, and I, for one, will no longer deal with them.

Similar experience on the reseller side of things

[almaon]

I work a local Apple retailer, we deal with new and used equipment.

We've had a few break-ins in the past, the owner of our store tried contacting pawn shops in town to ask them to keep an eye out for iBooks/PowerBooks that might show up soon cause of the break-in. What is truely pathetic is that the pawn brokers just hung up as soon as they heard anything about stolen goods. They didn't want to be involved in the slightest. That really made me mad that people out there are allowed to run such a shady business. But that's America for ya, thanks Martha Stewart...

As I mentioned earlier, we deal in used equipment as well. We're able to track S/N through Apple's service site, so we often catch a lot of stolen equipment. If the names don't match up for example, obvious red flag. Other times it just seems like some scam is taking place, especially when the kids that steal these things don't know how to turn em on, what the product name is, don't know the password or username, etc. So we play along with them, claim we just need to take it in back for a few minutes to 'test it out', run the serial number, call the cops and see if it's been reported, if so we have the police come pick them up and return the product to the customer (another reason not to buy mail-order, sometimes the local guys are looking out for you more ways than one).

But even phoning the police on these matters is rediculous, in our city, you have to talk to about 10 different people, none one at the station seems to care. Which is frustrating, they have an attitude that it's not worth getting off their butts to check for a serial number. And yet, every one we've phoned in was reported and was finally returned.

I wish local police would have a website to allow you to look up serial numbers of reported stolen goods, it'd make reselling and buying for the customer a lot safer and ethical. Although I'm sure it's more a legal problem to pull that task off, but still... I can dream of a perfect world still?

I hope they sue EB for this, it's truely bad business.

Re:pawn shops

[Lewis Daggart]

All the EB's I've been to log the ID of the person, just in case something like this happens. It's possible that this store did not (which would be why the thief thought they would be a safe place)... but that in itself is illegal from what I understand. Sadly, it doesnt matter if they DID log the ID. We already know who the thief was.. EB sinply doesn't care.

Re:EB isn't exempt from state laws...

[Monkelectric]

I think the reason for the hard line from EB is that they know theft is a HUGE part of their business. Think about what easy money this is, no messy stock, shipping, delays, restocking, just profit and NO LIABILITY.

We don't have any EB stores where I live, but we have KB's and Game Stop, both of which sell used games, and I have to tell you their prices are horrible. Both places price games 5$ under retail. I can't imagine not paying the extra 5$ to get a new copy.

This isn't suprising at all

[Dragoon412]

This past holiday season, I was out of work, so I picked up a few hours at the local Gamestop (same company as EBgames), and after dealing with their store policies, I'm honestly suprised this doesn't happen more often.

The entire company is poorly run. They're still using an ancient, convoluted, DOS-based PoS system that appears to pre-date the existance of the company. District and regional managers play slash and burn with a store's allotment of employee hours, and then throw a fit and fire the store managers when secret shoppers complain that the one employee running the store by herself for 8 hours didn't manage to get through the daily 20-some box delivery from UPS. Orders for specific products are placed at a corporate level, not a store level, meaning that it's extremely common for stores to get in a glut of products they already have an excess of, or products they have no floor space for that won't sell anyways (like all their crappy collectibles, figurines, and trading cards). The store I worked at literally had Playstations and Xboxes and Gamecubes stacked up 6 to 8 feet in the employee bathroom for lack of anywhere else to put merchandise.

There's little to no emphasis placed on knowledge of games or gaming, and communication regarding the availability of new products to the store's emplyees is non-existant. Customer's are viewed as if they're some sort of problem, and treated with agreat deal of disrespect. They're routinely lied to and mislead, either out of contempt or ignorance. I've seen employees tell mom's shopping for their kids that Gameboy Advance games work in the old (circa 1990) model Gameboy, and employees routinely tag a Game Informer subscription on to a customer's order after the customer said he didn't want the subscription. I've personally been chewed out by a manager for talking a guy out of buying Halo (for the Xbox) for his kid's PS2. And of course, all this behavior is reinforced because the managers do it, too.

Gamestop/EB is a terrible chain. Seeing how they're run, I'm amazed they manage to stay in business. And seeing that they've ripped off a customer... well, that's a daily occurance.

Re:This isn't suprising at all

[Grave]

I'm sorry, but you're either lying about working for Gamestop or you are just really clueless. As a current employee of Gamestop myself, I can tell you that it should be common knowledge that EB and Gamestop are not the same company. Yes, the POS system is ancient, but you know what? It works.

I don't know what store you worked at, but none of the ones in this district allow any of the ludicrous selling behavior to go on that you described. My manager would chew me out hardcore for forcing a subscription on someone who refused it. And when we don't know the answer to a question, we find out for the customer. We never intentionally mislead a customer. You must have really worked in a seriously messed up store, because that just doesn't happen at any of the local stores.

The reason the PS2/XBOX/Gamecubes are stored in the bathroom is because I believe that's company policy. The bathroom can be locked easily while not preventing access to the back room (which is a pain to get into when it's locked).

In this district, when we have product that isn't moving off the shelves, we ship it to a store that does sell a lot of that product.

As for the subject matter at hand, though, we track the serial numbers of all systems we buy and sell, and while we don't hold merchandise (that wouldn't be very reasonable to do given the volume of trade-ins we get), we do have fairly strict policies regarding suspected stolen merchandise. We get contact information on everyone when they do a trade-in, so in the event of something like this, we could track down the individual and report them to the police. I'm pretty sure EB has the same policy here.

I just canceled a order with them...

[draziw]

For Battlefield: Vietnam - Their price was ~4 cents lower vs amazon. In the reason for canceling section I wrote that I didn't want to deal with a company that traffics in stolen goods and charges the victim to get their gear back.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0 00 1AO01Y/draziw

--
+1 for low user ID and love for SCO

EB should burn in hell.

[rrace]

EB has been ripping off people for quite some time. For example, recently a friend of my bought castlevania for the ps2 from one of the local eb games here, and despite the salesman pitch to sell it to him used he refused and bought it new, or so he thought. Turns out they pawned off a used copy of the game in a new box. How do they do that? It seems they lift the bottom portion of the case and stick the disc in while not having to remove that silver tag on the top portion that is suppose to indicate the game is new. When he opened the game there were scratches and fingerprints on the disc itself. I don't know if this is illegal but these kinds of underhand tactics won't gain them any sympathy from me, I hope someone takes them to court.

EB is not a pawnbroker

[sam1am]

Because pawn brokers, which EB would likely claim they are

The Florida Pawnbroking Act, chapter 539 of the Florida Statutes contains the following definitions:

539.001 2 (h)"Pawn" means any advancement of funds on the security of pledged goods on condition that the pledged goods are left in the possession of the pawnbroker for the duration of the pawn and may be redeemed by the pledgor on the terms and conditions contained in this section.
539.001 2 (i)"Pawnbroker" means any person who is engaged in the business of making pawns; who makes a public display containing the term "pawn," "pawnbroker," or "pawnshop" or any derivative thereof; or who publicly displays a sign or symbol historically identified with pawns. A pawnbroker may also engage in the business of purchasing goods which includes consignment and trade.

539.001 3 (a)A person may not engage in business as a pawnbroker unless the person has a valid license issued by the agency. A separate license is required for each pawnshop.

They are more likely covered under Chapter 538: Part 1: Secondhand Dealers.

Pawning indicates that the pawnbroker will hold the material for an agreed-upon time (not less than the state-mandated minimum) to give the seller time to buy it back, with exclusive purchase rights to that original owner. Secondhand dealers are buying it with no promise to sell it back to the original owner...
I'm not a lawyer, but watch me play one on slashdot...

EB is NOT making a profit!

[Anonymous Coward]

They're simply charging their customary 15% re-robbing fee.

As a Former Funcoland Manager

[Cloe_Rose]

As some of you may know EB/Babbages and Funcloand stores are all now owned by the Barnes and Nobel group.
If this store is using the model developed by Funco when I was worked for them in Texas the employees were required to get proof of who the person was ( state issues photo ID and if you are under 18 you needed a legal parent or guardian with you who then signed) and the customer was offered in store credit ( much higher $$ per game or to have a check mailed to the address on the picture ID. It sounds like the store manager might have been playing a little loose with the system put in place to differentiate the stores from pawn shops.
I had a situation pretty close to that happen to me in that the kid sold off his families games by bringing in a neighbor who posed as Dad so he could trade in twenty Nintendo games ( dating myself I know) for one super NES game... well grandma comes in the next day just livid at me...I explained the situation to her researched the transaction and asked her who the adult who signed the receipt was....she didn't care that her friend/neighbor enabled the kid to sell his games ..she just wanted to get them back......I handled it differently than the Florida case in that to keep the customer from going any more ballistic we hade the corporate office replace the games that were already sold ( the legend of Zelda) and ate the loss.....we did blacklist the son and neighbor ...

Similar story, but better results

[DunbarTheInept]

Some friends of mine recently had a whole shelf of DVD's stolen from their apartment (some of which were expensive imports from Japan). They contacted the police, filed the report, and were told that they should first call around to all the local used disc stores, starting with whichever ones were physically closest to their apartment. If the used disc store is on the up-and-up and wants to avoid legal troubles, they should be able to give them the goods back for free, and then it's *their* job to push things through the legal system to try to get reimbursed by the thief. Thus the legal hassles are offloaded from the original victim of theft to the store that bought the stolen goods, and the original victim walks away from the whole affair and doesn't need to be involved (except perhaps to give testimony as a witness in the event).

The preferred method was to have the victim of the theft do all the 'legwork' and only involve the police if there is some difficulty in getting cooperation.

Well, it worked. They found someone had just sold an alottment of DVD's that exactly matched the list of stolen goods (minus one that the thief apparently kept or lost). The store was cooperative and returned the goods. They had the name of the thief on record (and he'd stupidly used his real ID and real name when selling the goods), and were going to deal with the court case themselves.

That was the last we'd heard of the incident.

It would be a happy ending if it wasn't for the fact that the thief (remember he used his real name) turned out to be a friend we all knew. He knew about the DVD's because he'd been invited over on occasion to watch them. Obviously, this incident was the end of friendly relations with the guy. When my friend called him on the phone, he claimed "Oh, yeah, those DVD's, uhm yeah, some homeless black guy said he just found them and he gave a bunch of them to me. I didn't realize they were yours or I would have given them to you, dude." (Yeah, right - some of those DVD's were really obscure rare items, so there's no way he could fail to notice that that exact combination of DVD's was the same as the ones at his friend's house.)

Some people can be real scum.

But anyway, the point of the story is that this incident is an example of how pawn shops are supposed to work when everything is being done legally and with good intentions, unlike what EB games did.

I won't be shopping at EB, will you?

[Anonymous Coward]

I presume that everyone reading this on Slashdot will pass it on to everyone they know who may have ever done business with EB. I know I did. With a little luck, this could end up costing them huge in lost business. As far as I'm concerned, there's one thing EB could do to redeem themselves. The chain's corporate HQ could sue the franchise holder for damaging the corporate name through his illegal actions. Reimbursing this lady is necessary, but it is no longer enough by itself.

RFID would solve all of your problems

[John Harrison]

Oddly enough the most demonized techonology on /. would solve the problem nicely. If these items each had an RFID tag on them and the RFID tag had owner info written on it at the time of sale then you could track it back to the original owner easily.

Of course RFID tags are manufactured by Satan himself and there is no legitimate use for them, or at least so say the /. editors.

Re:Let EB know about what you think of their polic

[Vexinator]

Good advice, and I took it.
The gist of the conversation went as such:

I explained that I would not be doing further business with them unless they changed this policy, which conflicts with laws designed to protect against the sale of stolen goods.

The EBGames customer service rep put me through to a manager, who mentioned that this particular Florida incident took place over a month ago (the article above has the data Jan 29) and that they had been in contact with Michelle since then and were trying to rectify the situation.

At this point I told them a press release regarding this matter, and any policy changes that occur from it, would be appreciated.

All depends on the area you are in.

[Mike the Mac Geek]

My house was robbed, and the items traded in at Gamestop.

Luckily, the police were on it fast, got the stuff seized, Gamestop fully cooperated. I been going there ever since.

EB, I used to go there all the time. Never again.

Someone should tell her...

[Vthornheart]

About regulation 538.08 (in the Florida Laws regarding secondhand dealers)

--- 538.08 Stolen goods; petition for return.--

(1) If the secondhand dealer contests the identification or ownership of the property, the person alleging ownership of the property may, provided that a timely report of the theft of the goods was made to the proper authorities, bring an action for replevin in the county or circuit court by petition in substantially the following form:

Plaintiff A. B., sues defendant C. D., and alleges:

1. This is an action to recover possession of personal property in _______________ County, Florida.

2. The description of the property is: (list property) . To the best of plaintiff's knowledge, information, and belief, the value of the property is $_______________.

3. Plaintiff is entitled to the possession of the property under a security agreement dated __________, (year) , a copy of which is attached.

4. To plaintiff's best knowledge, information, and belief, the property is located at ____________________.

5. The property is wrongfully detained by defendant. Defendant came into possession of the property by (describe method of possession) . To plaintiff's best knowledge, information, and belief, defendant detains the property because (give reasons) .

6. The property has not been taken under an execution or attachment against plaintiff's property.

(2) The filing fees shall be waived by the clerk of the court, and the service fees shall be waived by the sheriff. The court shall award the prevailing party attorney's fees and costs. In addition, when the filing party prevails in the replevin action, the court shall order payment of filing fees to the clerk and service fees to the sheriff.

(3) Upon the filing of the petition, the court shall set a hearing to be held at the earliest possible time. Upon the receipt of a petition for a writ by a secondhand dealer, the dealer shall hold the property at issue until the court determines the respective interests of the parties.

(4) In addition to the civil petition for return remedy, the state may file a motion as part of a pending criminal case related to the property. The criminal court has jurisdiction to determine ownership, to order return or other disposition of the property, and to order any appropriate restitution to any person. Such order shall be entered upon hearing after proper notice has been given to the secondhand dealer, the victim, and the defendant in the criminal case. --- Why on EARTH did she pay for something that was hers? The thought must've occurred to her at some point that there was a process (like the one listed above) to get it back without paying. Of course there is. And of course, it adds shady points to EB for taking advantage of her lack of knowledge and trying to score some extra illegal bucks. That's just low.