Utah Attorney General’s Office raids pawn shops for stolen goods

SALT LAKE COUNTY – The pawn shops have been raided, but now the heavy work begins.  State investigators have a mountain of evidence to sift through after they seized possible stolen goods from shops in Northern Utah.

The Utah Attorney General’s Office has been looking into the pawn shops for over a year.  Investigators were getting tips from several different sources.

“You had local law enforcement giving us information.  You had businesses giving us information,” according to Utah AG Assistant Chief of Investigations Nate Mutter.

Seven shops were raided, in all, spanning from Salt Lake to Utah counties.  Mutter says they took in between a million and $1.5 million dollars worth of good.

“Power tool, kitchen appliance, sporting goods… you name it, if it was brand new, we may have taken it as evidence,” Mutter says, adding, “The amount of evidence we took out is overwhelming.  We didn’t realize how much we would be taking.”

However, they’re not 100 percent certain all of those items were stolen.  They now have to sift through all of them to see where the items came from and who brought them to the shops.  That’s when Mutter says they’ll have a better picture of who they need to arrest.”

He says, “Whether that is people that are potentially stealing property from various locations around the state or just the pawn shops or anyone else that can be involved.”