“There are organized crime rings that do nothing but steal this stuff, then they put it up on the marketplace,” Plummer said. “Tools, you name it, they are stealing it.”
Plummer said locally, there have been pockets of people from out of state stealing from local stores. People stealing from retailers is part of the reason businesses close and prices go up for honest consumers, he said.
Beavercreek Police Department spokesman Capt. Shawn Sumner said retail thefts are always an issue that police are monitoring. He said identifying an item as a stolen product can be difficult because some things -- like clothes -- are distributed in bulk with little identifying information.
“Things like tools and electronics can be a little easier,” he said.
The bill will impact high-volume sellers, Plummer said, so most people will be able to continue to sell their items online as normal.
“Specifically, the bill defines a high-volume third-party seller as a participant in an online marketplace that, in any continuous 12-month period has entered into at least 200 discreet sales for new or unused consumer goods resulting in at least $5,000 of gross revenue,” a release about the bill says. “The required identifying information for sellers on product listings would include details such as name, email address, or business tax I.D. number and would further require the online marketplace to verify such information within ten days of the seller qualifying as high volume.”
The Coalition to Protect America’s Small Sellers (PASS) is an advocacy coalition that is made up of platforms like eBay and Etsy. It originally was an opponent of the Ohio bill and executive director Chris Lamond said while the bill is a product of compromise, there are still issues with the timeline of requirements. He said PASS is also focused on advocating federal legislation.
“We are supportive of efforts to pass a thoughtful federal standard that enhances consumer protection while not negatively impacting our sellers privacy or placing overly burdensome requirements on our sellers, In practice, these measures would inappropriately advantage big-box retailers over small businesses and casual sellers,” PASS said in a statement on their website.
The coalition said requiring disclosure of a seller’s identifiable information will harm privacy, but also said that bad actors are not welcomed on their websites.
The Ohio bill has passed the house and now the Ohio senate is considering it. A senate committee hearing for the bill was held last week.
“This is a problem for a lot of our communities,” Plummer said during the hearing. “We have businesses closing down because of constant theft. A for-profit business, they are in it to make money and not to lose their profits through theft where people sell these items online at a discounted rate.”
He said that fencing used to imply people selling stolen items out the back of their trunk or at a pawn store, but that’s not the case anymore.
“Online marketplaces are a new fencing area where people are selling stuff and stolen goods,” he said. “It’s a shame we have to keep tweaking the Ohio revised code to fix the problem of the few that affects the many but that’s what we do. It’s just another loophole and if we close this loophole it will slow down some of the thefts we are seeing at some of our businesses.”
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