I had something similar that rattled me. I would never buy something I know is stolen. But I bought a used Honda generator for a company going out of business. When I worked on it about a week later, I noticed the serial number plates were removed. I called the woman who sold it to me then and she had no explanation. I did not want to accuse since it could have been an employee prepping to steal and did not get around to it or she was just lying (probably most likely).
Most tool theft is from pros or directly from big box stores. I think the stores tell there employees not to confront due to safety & liability and the crooks know it and rapidly wheel out carts of new product. Be very suspicious of boxed new stuff selling under store price. There is a high chance it is stolen. I wish the stores would take a more proactive approach to this.
It is also not just tools that get stolen. Wire and other construction supplies too. Around 2013 I was going into a Home Depot near Oakland, CA and I saw a middle eastern garb guy wheeling in shopping carts of mixed supplies for store credit. He was having the clerk scan every item and anything with a Home Depot stock number was getting taken and other stuff tossed in another cart. They did this for store credit they would resell on Craigslist for a modest discount per $. I was so mad I went up and complained to the manager and said I will never buy more supplies there (and I buy a lot) if they do not address it. He did not want to say anything.
As a country we need to take our head out of our rear end in obviously wrong situations and say f' corporate lawyers and do what is right. Else stuff like this rarely gets better. There is no way to prevent all theft but companies should not be doing stuff that effectively encourages theft and passing of those losses onto others who do what they are supposed to.
Part of the issue with the whole “do something” argument, is that the major corporations suffering a lot of the theft, are lazy and careless, which can lead to claims of stolen merchandise for items actually purchased, or theft claims because someone tried to scan something and it didn’t actually scan.
Back in my late teens a Home Depot employee accused me of theft because I was wondering the aisles looking at the various stuff HD carried, and must have “looked suspicious”, since apparently the only reason to go to a warehouse store was to buy exactly what you needed and leave.
Weirdly, no actual professional hardware or industrial supplier has ever given me the same problem. They usually also have catalogs. Maybe HD has a giant catalog, but I’ve never seen one.
Unfortunately for tools, there are no easy universal databases to look up serial numbers to determine possible theft, not that that could also cause issues.
If you get a tool without a serial number, there is also no way to look up an item by description, to determine if the item might be stolen.
There is also no way to reregister an item without a serial number.
The police generally don’t want to get involved in the above, unless they specifically want to charge a person for something.
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