$2,000,000 worth of 360's stolen.

[kaseli]

Possession of stolen goods exists so that there is a reason for people to buy 360s from EB rather than from the mob, considering the mob would be selling the same product for far less.

What is so complex about this?

[Ren]

Well, if, take my previous example, an EB Games employee stole the truckloads to sell in his or her store to skyrocket their store profits, it’s still thievery, even though EB Games is technically trustworthy.

edit; even then, Ren, the 360’s come in boxes when they’re manufactured; they aren’t put in boxes in store. So if an individual stole them, and sold them; they might have been sold in their original box anyways.

That was just hypothethical. Sometimes people will open these boxes to sell the console for a lower price, and then the joypads and other accessories are sold apart.

If a store sold stolen goods, it’d be in a whole lot of trouble. It may take just one customer logging in to Xbox Live for it to cause an investigation, as Sin said. When the police discovers where the purchase was made, it’s a matter of time before a handful of people are taken under arrest.

And even so, they’d have to forge a lot of legal documents. And then there are the taxes. Though tax declaration varies from country to country, the basic principle is always the same. You tell the government how much you earned in a fiscal year, and how much you spent, and based upon it you have to pay or receive some amount. Now imagine a store saying it spent 100,000 bucks in goods, but the amount of goods it sold totalled 110,000. They’d have to explain how they got those 10,000 worth in goods for free - or do something that will get them in further trouble if caught, hide it altogether from the government.

[Infonick]

It could be possible for MS to find a couple if the systems have some sort of unique ID, which I believe they do, through XBox Live. Once the systems connect, MS could probably track it back to the IP. The only trouble would be if MS has those numbers. However, even without those numbers, it could still be possible for police to find the systems since that is a shitload of XBox 360s. It’d be hard to turn those around for a profit without any suspicion rising.

As for people buying the stolen systems, if they bought it from a store, like EB, then they’d probably be fine. They might have to pay a fine or give up the system, but they wouldn’t be charged. If the person bought the system from another person, they could be charged, but the charges would be minor and the penalty would be very small.