General Category > General Discussion
stolen collections
severcool:
Has anybody had any luck trying to track down a thief that stole their collection? I've been searching eBay and Craigslist, but haven't come up with anything. A few weeks ago, I went to drop off more junk at my storage locker. I noticed the padlock was gone. Unfortunately, the unit was broken into. Luckily, most of my stuff is junk and old clothes that I just can't seem to part with. I'm a bit of a packrat when it comes to sentimental possessions. A few of the noteworthy items stolen were my empty original boxes to my NES and SNES collections and tubs of about 350 CDs. The games are all at my apartment cased up and the CDs are ripped to my computer, so it's not a total loss. However, it sucks getting your stuff stolen. Does anybody have any advice on where to look to see if I could find my stuff for sale? The State Police are involved, but I don't have much faith in them catching someone for such a relatively small crime (although I was one of six units hit). There really aren't any pawn shops around to check. Any advice would help!
One thing I did find humorous is that they didn't touch the open box of duplicate Atari 2600 games that was out in the open. I guess everyone has Combat and Bowling in their collection...
segamer:
It's been about 5 years now but my entire video game collection was stolen. I had very unique items but I never had luck finding them. I looked at craigslist for months and called all the local video game stores. Nothing, natha, zippo!
monjici:
Maybe your empty boxes got trashed.
A trend I suspect in my area is people stealing from one big city, then do a road trip each weekend to sell stuff in another big city (about 150 miles/ 200 km apart).
So don't just check local. Good luck.
Megatron:
A large chunk of my collection got nabbed back in 2009 when I was just starting to get heavy in to it. Luckily, I knew the thief and figured out who did it and was able to confront him with the police (who are sold old USMC buddies of mine) before he got rid of any of it. Got all of it back within 72 hours.
That said, at his place there were piles of stuff for different markets. Gamestop, craigslist, ebay, and pawn/retro game stores. He also had my more rare items in their own section since those would likely the titles stores would be on the lookout for.
What I was able to figure out is that the common stuff he was going to sell in chunks because who WASN'T trading in Gears of War 2, Ha;lo 3 and Mass Effect in 2009? Nothing suspicious there. Same with ebay and craigslist. He was selling the games in sets, with some of his own (stolen or not, I don't know) thrown in. Again, mostly popular titles.
The one thing that made a lot of sense, anything with distinctive marks - tape, marker, broken pieces, etc can be identified. These were separated out from the rest, possibly to get rid of out of town, or fix in order to avoid being recognized. That's actually how I was able to convince my law enforcement friends he had my property - I convinced him to send me a picture of something, and in the background is a PS3, with a chip on the corner. The same chip one of the officers was able to recall my model having
TLDR - if your games had distinctive flaws or markings, call around to local shops and let them know this was stolen and if (for exammple) an Earthbound with sharpie "Justin Family" on the back comes in, they'll know it's stolen. It's a long shot, but if the thief(s) are smart, they aren't just going to try and dump it all at once. What they didn't just throw away, that is.
larryinc64:
I just had a awful thought of the went "oh these boxes are all empty" and tossed them :-[
What kind of games were the boxes too?