Stolen goods and recalled products

Both are prohibited, for different reasons. Stolen goods are somebody else's property. Recalled products have been declared unsafe by the people who made them or by a regulator, and passing one on hands the hazard to a stranger.

Stolen goods

You may not list anything you know, or reasonably should know, was stolen, and you may not list an item whose serial number has been removed, altered or defaced. A missing serial is treated as a signal in itself, because that is what is done to an item to make it untraceable.

Phrases like no questions asked, fell off the truck and hot item will stop a listing on their own, as will offers to buy catalytic converters or copper wire for cash with no receipt.

Recalled products

Anything under an active safety recall or a stop-sale notice cannot be listed. In practice this is mostly children's equipment: drop-side cots, recalled car seats, inclined infant sleepers, and infant or child products that do not meet current safety standards. Before you sell used baby gear, check the model against the manufacturer's recall page. A car seat that has been in a collision should not be sold at all.

If you think an item you are looking at is stolen

• Do not buy it. Buying stolen property is an offense in most places, and you will lose both the item and the money when it is traced.
• Do not confront the seller and do not arrange a meeting to investigate.
• Report the listing: more menu, Report, then Prohibited item, and add what you noticed.
• Contact your local police, who are the only ones who can act on the property itself. Give them the listing link.

If the item is yours and you can prove it, tell the police first. Jinu can remove a listing and act on an account, but it cannot recover property, cannot confirm who owns something, and cannot hand you another user's details. A police request is the route that reaches those.

Buying safely second hand

Ask for the box, the receipt, the charger, the spare key, whatever should be there. Check that a phone or a laptop is signed out of its previous owner's account before you hand money over: a device still locked to somebody else is worth nothing to you.