I've read in the past stories about cops getting tips from people that their stolen stuff is on Craigslist. At the time I thought it's cool they are catching people but I guess if they rely upon the thinking of a civilian who just had their laptop stolen going and saying "omg that's my laptop!!" "I mean sure the serial number is wrong maybe they are lying about that.. It's totally mine.. Hey police you gotta bust that guy!" It seems like that is very likely to result in lots of false positives since your average person is not a detective.. The police should be doing more digging on this stuff before they just assume stuff is gonna be stolen.. Especially if part of their MO is to look for people of color.. Completely unacceptable..
I am responsible for creating a false positive. A notebook was stolen soon after I received it back from an OEM screen repair. The next day the same model showed up on Kijiji of all places. From the pictures, I was certain it was mine because there was an identical ExpressCard, the logo on the back of the screen was bent just as I had received it from repair, 2 of the 4 stickers were removed just as mine were, Also the RAM and hard drive were a non-standard upgraded amount. To top it off, it even had the ubiquitous glowing mushroom background. The cops checked it out, and the serial # and windows product key did not match.
The 'collision' of my cosmetic and functional alterations matching with someone else may have seemed unlikely, but it really wasn't. The laptop did not have a SD card reader (the expresscard), the stickers were in annoying places, of course you're going to get the same size of upgraded hard drive & memory, and that logo attachment sucked. Even the mushroom background was common enough.
The police showed up and asked to match the numbers at the door of the seller. There wasn't. They apologized. They phoned me back, and I apologized for wasting their time. I also made an apology to the seller, who was incredibly cool about it. Probably because no tasers were involved.
