Quote:
Originally Posted by hatzie
The person in possession would have to meet the criminal to pick up the stolen parts. They can ID the guy and say where they met them.
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Unfortunately, doesn't always work out, though. Depends mostly on how clumsy or ignorant the seller is and how savvy and/or motivated the local PD is.
Here in my city, through the early 2000s, the local PD's cybercrime division was sorely lacking and/or totally overwhelmed, I'm still not entirely sure which. A neighbor's laptop was stolen when his house was burglarized. eBay buyer in Texas contacted him a short period of time later to get his password after buying from the fence's eBay account. We confirmed the serials matched and I even had someone on city council giving me direct access to the PD to relay info. Sadly, PD's cyber team was either unable or unwilling to dig, so I used my work resources to trace the eBay account and PayPal account to two young men about 7 miles away in the next city east, roughly 1/2 mile from the most eastern PD precinct. I gave firsname, last name, business aliases, their social media pages, all known email addresses, etc. I also had access to PD's crime reports and was able to match up multiple items recently sold in their eBay account to local burglaries from the last 90 days. Still, with all this evidence I was literally handing to their cyber division, they were unwilling to approach eBay for a records request because the goods were being sold entirely out of state and they weren't willing to work on it. Instead they watched the residence to monitor for fence-like activity. They ultimately ended up nailing the SOB's 9 months later on a handful of charges, but they had half a dozen charges on them 9 months prior, and the guys were allowed to continue victimizing people for months when they potentially had enough to obtain a warrant for the residence and arrest for the eBay sales alone, then nip it in the bud. Just annoying for me, a non-LEO who tends to work with LEOs a lot via my line of work and community volunteerism. But I'll never slander our public servants in blue, just like teachers, our LEOs have one of the more impossible jobs in society.
For this truck/parts case, the more savvy the crook, the tougher it gets, especially for smaller PDs who may lack resources of a larger city's PD. Let's say the local PD's cyber resources were actually proficient, but the thief and/or chop shop operator was smart enough to only communicated on Craigslist email using a mail.ru account or something - it's based in Russia where they could care less about US police matters or a court order/subpoena/warrant, so trying to find out who was behind the account proves impossible. The PD team could potentially file a records request with CL to get the seller's IP, then go to the ISP to trace the user, but what if the user was - again - using a VPN internationally? Most PD's won't bother with international subpoenas even with a friendly country if they know it's international. You could work off the meet-up spot, but I would expect someone selling stolen goods would probably choose to meet in the back of a Walmart parking lot where there's no cameras to record anything. Would make it a tough path.
Fortunately, criminals usually aren't that smart or savvy. For that we should be thankful.
And that said, I hope Gotentntitan's local PD nails these jack@sses to the wall. One less thief scumbag on the street.