dml-at-umd

States have various rules for finding the original owners. Unfortunately, they're mostly rather antiquated, like having to post in a local newspaper. The onus is really on the person who lost/had their property stolen to track down where it might be.

Some states require that anything of value seized by the police has to be sold at public auction. I think the spirit is that it has to be made available to the public to avoid the state simply taking it for themselves, fwiw.

Thanks for the kind words!

We looked for other police auction websites; the only other US-based one we found was GovDeals. We analyzed their police auctions and found they paled in comparison to PropertyRoom. As far as we can tell, PropertyRoom is the major player.

I'm Dave Levin, one of the authors of this study. Happy to answer any questions!