Someone in Moore, Oklahoma listed a stolen U-Haul for sale last week, and they would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling U-Haul enthusiasts. The seller posted the U-Haul box trailer on Facebook Marketplace and then supposedly decided to boost its exposure a bit by posting the listing to a vintage U-Haul Facebook group. That last move turned out to be a bad decision, as the people in that group quickly realized it was stolen, figured out where it came from, and even got it recovered within just a few hours.
The listing has been taken down, but the Facebook group still has the pictures. According to one of the group members, the trailer’s origin was in Oklahoma City and it was stolen on November 17 last year; you can see its ID “RV2488K” near its roof in an image. They found the address by spotting a neighboring house number in one of the seller’s photos and punching it into Google Maps. Another member then posted both the seller’s address and a Google Maps Street View photo of their house, so a U-Haul Area Field Manager (AFM) could go out there and see what was up.
When the AFM got there, seemingly just three hours later, he called the police and found that the seller didn’t actually steal the trailer. Supposedly, the current owner unknowingly purchased it from someone else, and even had an (evidently fraudulent) bill of sale from that transaction. The Drive reached out to the Moore Police Department to confirm the group’s findings, and we’ll update this article should we hear back.
While all that’s a bummer for the seller, who will now likely eat the money they spent on the trailer, it’s remarkable how quickly the U-Haul sleuths worked to track it down and recover it. The thief might have gotten away in this case, but it’s still a warning to anyone who might attempt a similar swindle in the future: Don’t try to sell a U-Haul trailer online, or they might just find you, too…