John Loftis of Oklahoma is a collector ofarcade video gamesfrom the 1970s and 1980s. Unfortunately, four of his old school arcade cabinets were stolen from his home by then-unknown thieves. It seemed as though Loftis would never get his arcade games back, but then he received a call from a man who was selling arcade games. Sure enough, they were the arcade games that were stolen from Loftis in the first place.
Loftis then arranged to meet with the apparent thieves, Perry Don Ingle and Candi Bailey, at a Love’s truck stop in Moore, Oklahoma. The Oklahoma County sheriff’s department set up a sting operation at the truck stop, and arrested both Ingle and Bailey as soon as they arrived to make the illegal sale. The arcade games were kept in a moving truck, but the names of the arcade games haven’t been publicized.
In addition to being arrested for stealing the arcade games and then attempting to sell them back to their original owner, Bailey was also arrested on four drug complaints, according to local affiliate News 9. Loftis was apparently not surprised that at least one of the perpetrators was involved in other criminal activities. “I’ve never met them, but I don’t think this is their first go round either,” he told News 9.
Video game thievery is unfortunately nothing new. Over the years, we’ve seen some thieves get rather creative in the way they steal video games, like the man who used a fruit scale to trick a self-checkout machine to think he only needed topay $10 for a brand new PS4 system.
While stealing video games isn’t a good thing, at least the stolen goods are sometimes put to good use. When the stolen video games can’t be returned to their rightful owners like with Loftis’s situation, sometimes thevideo game consoles are donated to children’s hospitals, as we saw some French policemen do last year. Needless to say, donating them is a much better alternative to destroying the stolen video games or keeping them locked up in an evidence room.
