Stolen items sometimes turn up at pawn shops

Ace Pawn Shop manager Chris Banol and TomCats Pawn Shop store clerk John Eller have seen their share of stolen items that turn up for sale.

Although Eller said half of 1 percent of the items in his store are stolen, he still has to answer to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office regularly. Both shops, which are regulated by the Indiana Department of Financial Institutions, are responsible for keeping items for 10-day periods before they can be sold to customers.

“The first thing people do when they get something stolen is call a pawn shop,” Eller said. “We send in a list on CD-ROM to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office of everything we collect. Only Monroe County gets our records. Thieves aren’t the smartest people. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be stealing. But they know how to manipulate the system. They’ll go to the county over.”

Banol said a lot of the stolen items that arrive at Ace Pawn Shop are taken from student housing while students are away for semester breaks.

For instance, this past break, Banol said there was an upswing of these items, the most unusual ones being power tools.

“A lot of people just take them from open construction sites,” he said. “It’s like a theft of opportunity.”

Items are tracked by a case number and a form with the owner’s personal information, but the process of getting them returned to their original owner is futile if they don’t take the time to record the serial and model numbers of all valuables and keep them in a safe place, Banol said.

“Always copy down a serial number when you buy something,” Eller said. “There’s not enough of that. There’s not much we can do if somebody says we’re missing a black laptop.”

Banol expressed a similar sentiment.

“People can’t just come in saying they’re missing a PlayStation 2, because there are 10 billion of those. So claims require a current ID and a thumbprint,” he said.