Wow. I've seen some examples of criminals with nerve, but it must have taken some real brass to get this flagrant. A United States Postal worker has admitted in court that he is responsible for the theft of 2,200 videogames that came into his hands by way of GameFly, costing the rental service more money than I'd like to imagine.
Reginald Johnson, 34, was caught after numerous complaints about missing discs triggered a surveillance mission in his local area. Federal agents cornered Johnson and found 160 GameFly mailers in his SUV, along with GameStop receipts and merchandise.
He had been stealing the games and putting them toward GameStop credit. That's right, he wasn't even doing this for money, he was risking his neck and stealing videogames ... to have more videogames. Wow.
Like I said, real brass on this guy.
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Contest:
2:20 PM on 10.16.2009
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Seriously, stealing from the USPS is no joke. He'll be in for awhile...
Hmm.
Doubtful, they didn't bother raising an eyebrow when my bro stole my entire ps2 collection, over 100 games, took them all out of the boxes and just sold them a pile of disc's and slim ps2. Then they refused to give me any information about what he sold to them when I questioned them about it and said I needed a police warrant. My brother is 16, he's underage, and not even my mom proving she was his mother swayed them into giving us an ounce of information.
that seems like an incredibly redundant process.
i forget where i heard it, but someone told me that we deserve a better class of criminals. couldn't be more true..
When we check games in for trade in credit, it is actually a company policy that we will not take multiple copies of a game. If someone walks in with two or more copies of something I can't even take back one of them, I have to refuse both of them.
He probably takes a few random ones trades them in, and then heads to another GameStop down the road. (We have 4 GameStops within a mile of each other, so it happens a lot.)
GameStop takes signatures every time someone trades something in, don't they? Didn't that raise any flags at corporate headquarters?
You don't have to be of age to trade games in. The only time you need to be over 18 is if you do cash trades. In my store we do what we can to help people out if they happen to come in asking about stolen things people have traded in. But to a point it's the job of the police to figure out what happened and to contact the store or Distric Manager directly.
Yes, we do require a signature every time time someone trades anything, whether it be for store credit or cash. However he could have also used a fake name while trading in games for store credit.
If we suspect a game is stolen, what we usually do is pretend to go through with the transaction get all there information and then come up with an excuse as to why I can't complete the trade in. Once they leave I'll notify the police and/or call nearby GameStops to give them a heads up.
Other then that there is no way for corporate to know whether or not a game is stolen, it's up to store employees to make judgment calls and decide to go through with it or not. And since he was getting store credit and not cash, it would seem to be more believable.
That's not my point, my point is I shouldn't have to get the police involved when the person in question is underage and the mother of said person is asking for information and they refuse it, It's bullshit. If your younger brother stole some video games and sold them to gamestop, would you call the police on him?
That's not our job to mitigate things like that. He signed saying the trades were his. If you wanted to get the games back because they were in fact yours get the police involved.
I didn't know they even paid out cash for trade-ins now.
Games through mail is way more difficult than movies. For one thing, games cost $50 - $60 whereas movies are way cheaper, even BluRays. Plus, demand falls off way faster for games. People will still watch older movies, but how much demand is there for say... Kameo, Elements of Power now? And that game is only a couple of years old.
Still, I agree with you. I'd be willing to pay a little bit more to have access to a games queue on Netflix. Maybe they'll figure it out someday.
No, that's just GameFly sucking ass, as always.
"First this asshole commits robbery taking the discs, then he gets robbed by Game Stop's shitty trade in prices! They should both go to jail."
LOL
I'm not asking them to mitigate the situation, I just wanted information, your telling me his own mother can't get information on whether or not he sold them the games? I wasn't trying to get them back, we just wanted to make sure he was the one who did it and they refused to give us anything without a search warrant. I'm not gonna bother the police for something that can easily be handled by just looking in their system to see if he traded in a boat load of ps2 games. How hard is that?
Awesome.
2,200 games. For $86,000, the average value of the game traded in would be $39.09. Gamestop hardly gives you that much for a brand spanking new game, let alone games a few month old picked out at random.
People saying he's retarded for trading them in at Gamestop haven't thought things through (though he didn't really, either). Gamefly is a rental service, which means the high-demand items are also high-traffic items, pick one out of a mailbag and it's exponentially more likely to be Halo ODST than Perfect Dark Zero. Maybe he wants Perfect Dark for whatever godawful string of logic is going on in his brain, but he's got 12 copies of ODST. I'm sure even this guy wasn't dumb enough to trade in 12 copies of ODST to buy a copy of ODST, but probably traded in 11 copies, kept the last one, and used the credit to buy whatever he hasn't happened to snag from his five-finger discount.
All in all, not a bad plan when you don't get greedy and start breaking into triple digits.
Giving out information like that could be illegal. I dont know though.
You Got F'd In The A - 5G