Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/01/04
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I would highly suggest that every Lug member have his equipment serial #'s registered with his insurance agent....... Seeing how I have everything registered ..... I think it would be rather easy to prove possession and ownership of the equipment. If someone has waited 5 or 10 years to file a police report....... I'd politely suggest to the police that they run a quick background check on the filer of the fraudulent claim...... I Dealers have other risks when buying stolen equipment...... Our store policy was to purchase equipment via a mailed check using the address off of a valid drivers license and we took down all ID info.... I used to work with police departments and one of the things we did was call the local department everytime we thought we had a suspicious seller..... this had two benefits..... one we tried to reduce the risk of buying locally stolen goods and we let the police know through our actions that we didn't want to knowingly buy stolen goods.... Needless to say we had a good relation with them and we helped them with a lot of photography related questions and in turn we got a lot of business too. Crime scene photos make the most bloody medical work seem pretty tame...... In a case where a claim would have been filed for something that remained in our store.....(this never happened) we would have pulled out the file info on the person who sold us the equipment and given that to the detectives. We would pull the equipment off of the shelf but we would have insisted that the police check out the seller first before turning over the equipment unless the needed paperwork was filled out... Back when I worked in the photo retail business, I did manage to pay cash for a Voightlander reflex kit that was stolen and ended up being out $50..... of course the other real criminal was the guy who had it insured for about 1000% of it's actual value.......... I've met a few dealers who Walt managed to describe to a T.... that neither cared whether what they were buying was stolen or if what they were selling was either...... and several who re-paint and replace top covers on well worn user items and sell them as mint........ and I'm not talking about collectible cameras destined for a shelf somewhere...... My two cents Duane Birkey HCJB World Radio Quito Ecuador