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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;MrNate, post: 1517111, member: 5515&quot;]Good Morning Bev (and everyone else),</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;d like to address your remarks, and to do it as succinctly as possible. I&#039;ll start by saying what you are suggesting is theoretically possible, but I absolutely disagree with the suggestion you are making. A few thoughts (my opinions alone):</p><p><br /></p><p>Your suggestion, if I understand it correctly is something like &quot;the price of this item makes me think it must be stolen, the thief just needs to get it off their hands quickly.&quot; Please let me know if I&#039;m not interpreting your remarks correctly, but assuming that I am, here&#039;s some additional information;</p><p><br /></p><p>1. I take great care (or as great of care as I can) to interact with reputable people. I&#039;m never interested in acquiring an item through theft. I probably take greater care than most; one of my common practices on the site I&#039;m purchasing on is to look at the individuals profile, see when it was created (that&#039;s important), what type of person I consider them to be, and look at the other items they are selling. I have a pretty good sense of reputable vs non-reputable. For this specific seller, they have very normal photos, they&#039;ve been on this site for 5 years, and the other items they are listing are the epitome of pedestrian (dishes and houseplants). </p><p><br /></p><p>2. A criminal wouldn&#039;t operate in the way you are suggesting: let&#039;s consider this hypothetical, although I absolutely refuse to live my life based on hypothetical&#039;s: This person (a female in her 40&#039;s) is actually secretly breaking into houses and stealing stuff. So let&#039;s pretend this is a stolen item....The average home robbery is over from start to finish in 8-12 minutes. So that means that this thief only has about 10 minutes to ransack a house, find the most valuable items, and get out. They&#039;ve got a backpack at most to store these valuables. So our mid 40&#039;s female thief ransacks the house for jewelry, cash, and this beautiful silver item...</p><p><br /></p><p>3. So what&#039;s the problem with this argument? If she stole it, she did so because she thinks it&#039;s REALLY valuable. Because our thief can only carry so many items out of the house, they have to choose wisely (that&#039;s why thieves love jewelry, coin collections, cash etc: they are all small and easy to hold). But the real important piece is they think it&#039;s valuable. So why would this thief turn around and list the item as silver plated? And why would they list the item for $15? (I paid $31 total because I had it shipped to me). And why would a criminal use a well established profile to list something they stole (this site would make it very easy to track down the thief, and thieves <u>really like anonymity)</u>. But let&#039;s go one step further, because I paid them on paypal, which means now there&#039;s even more evidence to directly connect them to the stolen property. There&#039;s probably another 10-20 points I could make about why it&#039;s highly unlikely this person is engaging in criminal activity, but I hope my points illustrate a few of them. Oh, and of course when they shipped the item, they gave me their real return address, again leaving an amazing amount of potentially incriminating evidence if we assume this item was stolen.</p><p><br /></p><p>4. I hope that some of my points above convince you that this isn&#039;t a stolen item, as I have no doubt that it isn&#039;t stolen. But if I don&#039;t convince you, I hope that I&#039;ve provided some thoughtful discussion to our less experienced members. I consider it a very myopic view that because something valuable is priced so cheaply, it must be stolen. If you take time to go back to my previous posts, you will see a clear and resounding explanation on why <u>sometimes</u> valuable items get priced cheaply: because the person doesn&#039;t know they are silver. That&#039;s why I got this item for the price I paid, because the seller believed the item was silver plated. They didn&#039;t even bother to post a photo of the base markings because they didn&#039;t consider whatever those squiggly lines were on the bottom to be relevant. </p><p><br /></p><p>5. I&#039;ll close my remarks by saying anyone who is purchasing items is <u>very correct</u> to be careful &amp; cautious. There&#039;s <u>plenty</u> of scam artists looking to rip buyers off and there&#039;s certainly thieves who are selling items online. When you look at the totality of circumstance, I believe these individuals are mostly easy to spot, and in the case of the purchase I just made, I can&#039;t find a single scrap of evidence to suggest this item was stolen. It just doesn&#039;t add up to me.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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