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Comment by webnrrd2k | Hacker News Reader

I think serial numbers would be enough to stop the vast majority of people selling stolen items.

It would require companies to track serial numbers that go into the store, and serial numbers of items put on shelves, or otherwise legally leave the store. After a while, it'll be clear which items & serial numbers were legelly sold vs. stolen. And, to address the original point, copied stolen serial numbers still aren't any good.

The serial numbers of stolen items get reported to the authorities and/or Amazon, and it becomes their legal problem. As another post in this thread poins out, pawn shops have to do something similar to check for stolen items. So there is some sort of legal framework in place.

Im not saying that this should be i plemented or anything, I'm just trying to say that individual serial numbers might work. It will not be easy to implement, and cost money. But so does rampant theft. Maybe it's worth pursuing.

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So, I drive a truck.

It’s hard enough to get them to unload you when all they have to do is count pallets like “yep, 22 pallets of potatoes” even harder when they have to break down pallets to count individual cases and would be impossible if they had to verify every single item by serial number.

Even when I used to deliver to individual grocery stores it was difficult because they didn’t plan for unloading the truck on the schedule and they had to stock the shelves before the store opened so more often than not they just got their stuff off the truck as quickly as possible without even doing any sort of verification, just pull the pallets with their store number and let the department heads deal with it in the morning.

It sounds like a valid idea but the amount of labor would be astronomical.

You could do it like the expiration/plant batch codes on food - ignored unless there’s an investigation for some reason.

Who would investigate? Amazon idngaf to the point that they are find with co-mingling fake and stolen goods and selling them under their own brand.

Attorneys General, likely. Amazon would be found selling stolen goods, told to clean up, they wouldn’t, and there’d be a kerfuffle and suddenly it would be one of the items that is harder to list (try listing Milwaukee cordless equipment on Amazon now for example).

Obviously that technique doesn’t work, as Amazon just patches up the hole and nothing else.

So you’ll be unable to buy serialized deodorant, but toothpaste will still be “off the truck”.

You need an actual consumer law with teeth that gets enforced, not one-off AG litigation.

This is what happens (in theory) with GSM mobile phones. GSM devices have a serial number in the form of an IMEI which can be blacklisted from networks if stolen [0]. There are, of course, still ways round it as detailed in the wikipedia entry - e.g. the blacklists are national ones, and organised groups can "just" ship the phones to another country and sell them there.

Even so, as you intimate, it does make it _harder_ to resell stolen phones.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mobile_Equipment...

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