Erm... I wasn't asking if it's difficult, I was asking what do you look for? Why in the world would a set of things to look for be a subject to conceal?

Edit: never mind, just realized you're worried I or someone else is trying to sell stolen goods and will abuse such a list that way, sigh...

Because thrift store criminals spend _so_ much time reading deeply nested comment threads on hackernews...

maybe the response would take 20 minutes to write.

Then spend the 20 minutes, or don't. Writing "the answer to your question exists" isn't a meaningful contribution.

are you mad at me suggesting that they didn't write it down because they thought it would take them too long to write?

At any rate they didn't just say the information exists, they also said it was basic pawn shop training, so I googled "pawn shop detect stolen goods" the top answer was from quora https://www.quora.com/How-do-pawnbrokers-verify-that-the-ite... and there was something from a blog of somebody called the blog nerd which is a little difficult reading because of all the SEO keyword optimization he seems to have done

https://www.pawnnerd.com/how-do-pawn-shops-track-stolen-item...

there seemed to be a reasonable number of other informative links.

oops, the pawn nerd not the blog nerd.