Take it or leave it...

[Anvil2k9]

In my opinion this thread is running out of
proportions because there is no logic
structure in it which a victim or a possible target
of fraud can follow up in case he is affected of.
at the moment it is rather mixture of police reports and
individual investigations whose initiators can stay
anonymous.

I believe the aim of this threat is to warn others
of buying stolen goods and I suggest the admins
should consider adding a special threat for the
one and only purpose of registering.

in a way Toshiba is doing it for years already
http://support-info.toshiba-tro.de/toshserv/stol-inp.NSF/7b579eebb1cf7a43c12562bc00798680?OpenForm

or more simplified
http://www.ccmostwanted.com/report/serial.htm

I added screen copies in case the sites may cease
one day.

I know serials will be more the case in watches.
so for clocks the input mask has to be more
sophisticated and detailed. that alone would
be very helpful to challenge ebay sellers with
special questions in advance hence
avoiding being a receiver of stolen items.

regards
Damian

[burnz]

Huh?:?|

[Tom McIntyre]

It would be a fair bit of work to do this correctly. You would need the form to capture the information and the database to put it in. Then you would need at least a couple of queries to find if a given item might be stolen.

Of course it would need to be documented so that our average visitor could use it.

There is work in place to make better databases from observations of articles to accompany some of the existing serial number lists and manufacturing lists. It might be easier to add a "stolen" attribute to that database with additional information associated with the stolen attribute.

Of course, if you know information like a serial number, you can search this forum for it and find any references. The same can be done for descriptive words with reasonable hope of succeess.