Gazelle Takes Action To Prevent Sale of Stolen Phones & Tablets

Gazelle has a new way to make sure thieves don’t profit from selling stolen devices called CheckMEND.

CheckMEND is actually a product of Recipero, a company that specializes in U.S. consumer electronics background reports. By partnering with Recipero and using CheckMEND Gazelle can make sure that anyone selling a device to the company actually owns the device they want to sell. That means that thieves won’t have the chance to make a profit off stealing a device like an iPhone and selling it to Gazelle.

With CheckMEND Gazelle can check devices against more than 150 billion records of information including more than 50 billion items. The service compiles data from the four major U.S. carriers and law enforcement organizations include the FBI for its dataset.

For users that means there’s a high chance that if Gazelle somehow gets a stolen device it can make sure that it isn’t wiped clean and that whoever stole the device gets no money.

Gazelle hopes that its new CheckMEND service will discourage the theft or electronic devices. It cites reports from New York City Police Commissioner who recently said Apple devices like iPhones represent 40 percent of all the stolen property in the city. San Francisco police also claim that 50 percent of robberies in the city involve cell phones of some sort.

Sometimes criminal will use a service like Gazelle to turn a quick profit from stolen goods, but they can’t sell them to Gazelle any longer.

Even before CheckMEND Gazelle would wipe the data from any device it received so that whoever bought the phone next wouldn’t have access to it. It’s not clear if Gazelle will still wipe data from stolen phones it receives, or if it will simply contact the owner and send it back to them. With any luck the company won’t have to return stolen phones to their owners too often.