Law enforcement doesn't patrol eBay
Miami Herald

MIAMI -- When someone stole Joe Delaney's two Jet Skis from behind his Miami Beach, Fla., home in February, he turned to surfing the Web.

It took three months, but that's where he eventually found one of the Jet Skis.

"I figured whoever took it was probably going to sell it," Delaney said. "It was a long shot, but I kept checking eBay."

Turns out the popular Web site, which bills itself as "the world's online marketplace," is quite a market for stolen property. Why? EBay is not routinely patrolled by law enforcement as pawn shops are, and with 21 million transactions daily, criminals can often hide in the crowd.

"Honestly, it's too big to get a handle on," said Bob Breeden, a Florida Department of Law Enforcement special agent.

First of all, the Internet is under no agency's jurisdiction, because it is no one place.

"Law enforcement as we know it today is set up on who has jurisdiction over the bad guy," Breeden said from his office in Tallahassee, Fla.

"The bad guy could be sitting in Spain posting something over the Internet. Maybe it's stolen. ... Maybe it doesn't even exist. An officer in Miami can't work the case, and neither can I."

Second, there's no effective way to monitor millions of daily transactions, each of them between one private seller and one private buyer. The sellers aren't required to provide serial numbers for the property they're auctioning off, and the buyers aren't required to check them anywhere.

In addition, buyers who suspect they have bought something stolen face losing their money and the item if they report it.

No one keeps crime statistics on online sales, but in May alone, cases of people using eBay to unload stolen property have surfaced in New Port Richie and Pensacola, Fla.; Windsor, Ontario; Memphis, Tenn.; and Williamsburg, Va., according to newspaper reports.

Authorities have found people trying to sell everything from stolen artworks to bulletproof vests destined for troops in Iraq.

Police in Hialeah, Miami and Hallandale Beach, Fla., also have recovered stolen items on eBay recently.

In Hialeah, surveying equipment was stolen last year and "three hours after the burglary, the device was up on eBay," said Sgt. Jose Calvo.

EBay spokesman Hani Durzy said the Web site prohibits listing stolen property, but he acknowledged that it's next to impossible for eBay to prevent stolen property from being peddled on the site.

"We have the ability to look for items that may be fraudulent or for sellers who may be fraudulent," he said. "However, we have absolutely no way of knowing whether an item may be stolen or not."

Durzy insisted only a small percentage of items on eBay are stolen.

"Most criminals, we're told by police, would rather do their fencing business in the shadows and not in the glare and spotlight that's on eBay," he said.

EBay auctions may be viewed by millions around the world, but common thieves know it offers more anonymity than a local pawn shop because no one's looking.

Pawnbrokers are required to fingerprint people pawning items. And police regularly check pawn slips for the serial numbers of stolen goods.

For Delaney, who has sold a car and a motorcycle on eBay, the Web site was obvious. But it wasn't easy to find his Jet Skis.

"I looked at every Kawasaki for sale in the state of Florida every couple of days," Delaney said, adding that he also checked other online auctions.

Then in April, he spotted one of his. The hull identification number had been removed.

That didn't surprise Delaney -- he had seen several Jet Skis for sale without hull numbers. Though selling any vehicle or boat without its identification number is illegal, it happens all the time online because no one is checking.

Even without a hull number, Delaney was sure he had found his Jet Ski. It had the mat that he put in it, and that damage to the front he remembered.

"I used them almost every day," Delaney said. "Not recognizing it would be like someone not recognizing their car in a parking lot."

He bid $2,100 on it and won. The seller even threw in Delaney's custom-made trailer to sweeten the deal. Delaney called police, who set up a sting and arrested two people in Miami when they delivered the Jet Ski.

Delaney's story is typical of victims who recover stolen property from online auctions -- they have to do most of the work themselves.

Because there is so much fraud, the FBI generally won't take a case if it involves less than $100,000. The U.S. Postal Service has the same threshold.

And local police simply don't have the time to trawl eBay for weeks on end to find a $2,500 Jet Ski that may have long ago been taken outside their jurisdiction.

Last year, the FBI took down a large eBay-linked fencing operation based in Chicago.

The suspects were accused of selling millions of dollars of stolen goods. They would even auction off things they didn't have yet, then go out and steal them.

"People are working these cases, but it's difficult," said Steve Francke, supervisor of the FBI's Internet fraud clearinghouse. "It's not an easy nut to crack. It's time-consuming, you use a lot of resources and a lot of times at the end of the day, the payoff isn't that much; a person gets a theft charge and a month in jail."

And what about items that don't have serial numbers and can't be traced? The National Retail Federation says it's a problem.

"Stolen merchandise does get sold on eBay and there's no official mechanism in place to curtail this," said Scott Krugman of the Washington-based federation. "If you sell a Gap T-shirt on the street corner or at a flea market, there's no real way to monitor that either.

"It's kind of the same problem; it's just being done over the Internet versus on a street corner."

S.D. cop and wife jailed in stolen-goods probe

By Pauline Repard
STAFF WRITER

July 22, 2004

A San Diego cop once hailed as a hero for pulling an elderly couple from a burning home was taken into custody yesterday after a two-month investigation concluded he was selling stolen goods on eBay.

Patrol Officer James Estrella was arrested with his wife at their Chula Vista mobile home as sheriff's investigators crawled through a warehouse packed with electronic and sporting equipment.

Investigators say the couple, working at computer stations in the warehouse, sold 800 to 1,000 items a month on the popular Internet auction site, grossing up to $20,000 monthly.

Estrella, 45, and his wife, Ruth, 35, are suspected of using different account names to sell goods to buyers around the world since 1999, including $6,500 worth of sound equipment recently stolen from an Escondido church, sheriff's Sgt. Kim Carson said.

Some of the church's property ended up in England and Hawaii.

"This is one of the larger fencing operations I've ever seen in my 26-year career," Carson said yesterday. "It looks like a full-time operation."

Estrella, a patrol officer in the San Diego Police Department's Southern Division, has been on a voluntary leave of absence for several months, said department spokesman Dave Cohen. He said he did not know why.

Estrella and his wife were booked into jail last night on suspicion of possessing stolen property.

Carson said it was routine work by Poway station sheriff's Detective Bob Bishop that uncovered the link among a pair of burglaries, an eBay auction site and the Estrellas.

The investigation began in May when a deputy stopped a car at the Poway Business Park and found it full of sweat shirts from ODM Co., a local sportswear distributor. After the company was contacted by authorities, it found that 4,000 sweat shirts were missing from one of its warehouses.

A man suspected in the theft also became a suspect in a break-in reported May 1 at Cornerstone Church of Escondido. Bishop made a routine search on eBay for the church's stolen sound gear.

"That's one of the searches we do, to look for high-end property," Carson said.

Bishop found that the church property had indeed been sold on eBay, and he got a warrant for the auction site's records on the seller. Estrella's name came up, which led to a search of the Chula Vista warehouse.

Cohen urged people not to jump to conclusions about Estrella.

"Officer Estrella is innocent until proven guilty," Cohen said. "Certainly, anytime a police officer is arrested, it is a concern. But we will let the criminal justice system play out on this one.

"If, in fact, he is guilty, we would certainly be disappointed."

Estrella received an award for heroism for his actions on a Sunday morning in April 1992, when he saw smoke coming from a house at First Street and Euclid Avenue in National City while on patrol nearby in San Diego.

He found flames leaping from the home and heard screams. Estrella kicked down a wooden fence, broke down a side door and rescued the elderly occupants, who were unharmed. Firefighters then arrived and put out the blaze.

The Estrellas' eBay site was shut down yesterday at the request of the Sheriff's Department. Detectives at the warehouse took several calls from eBay customers inquiring about items listed for sale and politely told the callers that the goods were no longer available.

Part of the 3,500-square-foot, tan stucco warehouse, behind a furniture shop on Main Street in Chula Vista, is subleased to the Estrellas and part to another renter not involved in the case, authorities said.

Investigators will try to match theft reports with goods arranged in countless stacks in the warehouse, Carson said.

He said there is no way to immediately tell how many of the items are from burglaries and how many were obtained legitimately.

Items piled on towering metal shelves ranged from cases of $100 athletic shoes to Callaway golf-club shafts, boxes of $1,000 underground-cable detector kits, old and new stereos, sewing machines, slide projectors, clothing, furniture, camera lenses, dolls, dishes, short-wave radio antennas and an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape player still in its box.

"They organized the warehouse so property is stacked pending sale on the auction site," Carson said. "It shows a degree of sophistication we don't see every day."

Carson said the couple also run a clothing embroidery shop in Tijuana. Deputies found an embroidery machine in the warehouse along with boxes of youth sports jerseys apparently awaiting decoration.

Pauline Repard: (619) 293-1893; [email protected]