Thumbprint required to trade in games in Florida

Is that even legal!?

Reason number 3,785 why I hate living in Florida.

All the more reason to use game trading sites.

As a former manager of Rhino Video Games and current manager/owner of Level 8 Video Games, I can tell you this is old(er) news.

In 2005 at Rhino, we were required to take a thumb print, brief description (Ht,Wt,etc), and obtain a signature for all trade/cash transactions. Additionally, we were required to mail the documentation for these to the local Sheriff's office (Polk County).

This process is one of the reasons we do not give cash for games at Level 8. We would like to but the process is at the cost of the business (duh) and we would have to pay an additional yearly fee.

The idea, obviously, is to protect citizens by limiting the number of outlets through which criminals can fence stolen merchandise. Of course, since it is government run, there is no efficiency to the system.

Picture your local Gamestop (or one day, local Level 8!). Think of how many finger prints that is per day, per city, per county. In a city with just two or three Gamestops and maybe a half dozen pawn shops, a sheriff's dept would be completely overrun with thousands of prints, signatures, and paperwork from what are largely completely legitimate transactions.

If you can picture this in your mind, you can understand how all government works, why it naturally grows, and why it must constantly be cut and trimmed.

That is kinda strange...the GameStop stores down here in Arizona don't even ask for an address! Bookman's only has me fill out a bill of sale as a formality, and then only for major hardware. The only place I 'had' to be fingerprinted (apart from my desktop) was Universal Studios last summer, apparantly so I couldn't give my tickets away for the second day (that place was a joke).

yeah...this is old news, we've been doing this since beginning of 2007. it really sucks and it's pointless. i've only had one ticket come up for suspicion....NOBODY records their serial numbers to their systems, so when their stolen there is no way to track them...rediculous. most people don't care though, and it keeps most theives out of the shop selling hot stuff all the time....it is a pain in the ass though.

The game industry loves this, I'm guessing. The person hocking a stolen game is certainly the minority - far more likely that the person selling the game is simply a gamer who has gotten all he wants out of the game and wants to trade it towards another game - making me think that the game industry likely lobbied for that legislature that added 'used games' to that list, discouraging people from trading in games by making someone fork over their fingerprint - something normally associated with criminals and how you track them.

More and more difficult to casually 'transfer a usage license'/sell a game. No way I'm giving my FINGERPRINT to a private company to get 7 dollars for my Gears of War 2 copy. So the industry wins again as they move towards non-physical downloads anyway.

All the people saying it's not a very big deal obviously don't live in the Broward area. I do and I gotta say, this really sucks. Giving out my phone number, zip, and address was enough, but now thumbprint? Just one more reason for me to stop selling games to Gamestop.

I live in FL, and this sucks. It seems you have to give your fingerprints for everything nowadays: Guns, Alcohol, Disney, Video games.
Oh well, I'll just trade my used games in at Amazon, b/c they always fuck up finger print identifications. A friend of mine registered for a concealed weapons license 6 months ago, just last week was he finally told they LOST the fingerprints. Now he has to send them in again.

Boy am i glad i live in Canada. Asking for fingerprints when trading in games is more than overkill. First off the people comparing Gamestop to a pawn shop seem to have missed out on one specific thing, that being that Gamestop does not offer cash for trade ins, only in store credit. Secondly the reason that Pawn Shops are required to take fingerprints is because if it is found that the items sold to them were stolen they can determine exactly who it is that sold it to them even if they provided fake ID. There is absolutely no way to determine whether or not a game has been stolen seeing as how they don't have any identifying features such as a serial number. There is absolutely no reason for this aside from growing a database and it is simply an inconvenience and an intrusion.

Actually current GameStop policy is very much NOT that. They're now quite strict about stopping illegal trade. A friend of mine said that taking in multiple copies of the same thing (barring things like memory cards for a PS2, where having more than one is logical) is an insta-fire, as is taking something in that is still shrink wrapped.

We just started this bull **** in Sacramento County and due to the lady who processes these forms being a pain in the ass she will now send out officers to stores that make mistakes on the forms(at tax payers expense.)

So rather than solve actual crimes or patrol the streets officers will have to harass Gamestop Associates about a single copy of Madden 2003 even though there is NO WAY to track a single disc.

Ummm.. I live in Orlando and as far as I know this has always been required??? Not News to me

Game trading has been treated the same as pawn shop trading in Clark County, WA for as long as I can remember, but at least there you don't have to get thumb printed, you just have to be over 21, which means anyone age 0-20 has to get their parents to trade in games for them, not to bad if you're under 16 or so but anything above that seems kind of... ridiculous.

Wow. I just wrote a Criminology essay on something very similar to this. Well, that was to do with preventing credit card fraud by requiring a thumbprint... it's a pointless idea for that, so what's the point for game trade-ins?

Also, if they want to make game stores equal to pawn shops under the law, shouldn't they give the customer the same right... i.e the ability to buy their goods back at the same price?

I truly do not understand this.

Dammit I live in Florida.

Not in that area tho, so let's hope this doesn't spread to Orange County.

it sounds like a way for the state agency to get your finger prints on to the database of the local & state police & federal. i dont think police of any agency give a damn if gamestop or any company lose a few bucks here & there . thier main concern are your finger prints . .

They are just trying to get young people used to this so Big Brother can do more things to spy on ya and they won't think anything of it. ;)

So wait, do you have to give a blood sample to trade in a car?

:P

Thanks for sharing this information. I found it very informative as I have been researching a lot lately on practical matters such as you talk about...

I live in Miami and I've never had to do anything of the sort when trading in games at GS.

Any word on if the police have to actually do any work, like say getting a warrant to look at these fingerprints? Or if Gamestop & other pawn shops is required to keep all this stuff secret?

A false positive would cause an individual so much more grief than thousands of thefts from stores. I really can't see how on balance this is good for anyone.