From the Wrong Side of the Record

I have a criminal record. Multiple felonies, prison time, and a trail of mistakes that spans the better part of two decades. I'm not going to explain it away or dress it up. It is real, it is mine, and I own every line of it.

What I'm going to tell you is the story of what happened next.

I was raised in a home built on faith. In 1991, my family — my father Edward, my mother Patricia, my sister April, and I — began seven years of missionary work across seven countries. We carried Bibles, built relationships, and served communities on multiple continents. Those years formed the bedrock of who I was supposed to become.

When I came home, I lost my way. The years between 2006 and 2020 hold the record of that loss — controlled substances, theft, and choices that put me in prison more than once. I have completed every sentence, every day of community custody, every fine. But I won't pretend the record isn't there. What I will say is that for a long time, the gap between the boy who crossed oceans to serve others and the man whose name appeared in court documents felt impossible to bridge.

Then I met Glen.

Glen Thomure was a disabled man with a generous heart. Someone he trusted handed him a tablet as collateral — a gesture he accepted in good faith. He had no way of knowing it was stolen. When law enforcement ran the serial number, Glen was arrested, booked, and charged. He lost his home. He lost his car. His relationship collapsed. His savings vanished into legal costs.

Glen died in a nursing home in Shelton, Washington, having never recovered from the cascading consequences of that single moment.

He was not a criminal. He was a victim of a gap in the system — a world where ordinary people have no fast, reliable way to verify whether something is stolen before they accept it, buy it, or sell it. There was no tool. There was no check. There was just a record with his name on it and a life that unraveled from there.

I knew that world. I had lived on both sides of it. And the weight of Glen's story settled on me in a way I couldn't set down.

Glen's situation isn't rare. It's the rule.

Every stolen item that enters the secondhand market doesn't just hurt the original victim — it creates new ones. Buyers defrauded. Innocent people like Glen swept into legal consequences they never saw coming. Families destabilized. Neighborhoods where trust erodes because no one can tell what's legitimate anymore. The stolen goods economy is not a victimless undercurrent of the resale market. It is a chain of harm that keeps producing new casualties long after the original theft.

I knew that too, from experience. I had been part of that chain. And I finally understood that the most meaningful thing I could do with that knowledge was break it.

SafeOrStolen exists to interrupt that cycle — not just to protect individual transactions, but to reduce the volume of crime that feeds off an unverified market in the first place. When people can check before they buy, sellers of stolen goods lose their market. When community theft registries are connected directly to the consumer's fingertips, the pipeline that moves stolen property from crime scenes into living rooms gets narrower. Safer transactions mean safer communities. That is the mission, and it is bigger than any one app.

I founded SafeOrStolen in 2017 — not as a business plan, but as an answer to a question no one had built a solution for yet: What if anyone could verify, in seconds, whether something was stolen before they touched it?

I spent four years learning to build it properly, through an intensive mentorship under Brian Haung, founder of CaSoft Seattle, who taught me web development, product architecture, and what it actually takes to build software that works. I incorporated the company in Arizona in 2025, and launched the live platform with a mission to provide real-time legitimacy verification for secondhand merchandise across U.S. and international markets.

The platform is real. Users scan IMEI numbers, VIN numbers, serial numbers, and license plates to check items against over 100 databases — including stolen property reports from all 50 statess, the carrier and theft databases, insurance claims, and police reports — covering smartphones, laptops, vehicles, firearms, bicycles, jewelry, and electronics. The system returns a result in seconds. Safe or Stolen. That simple.

The global secondhand market is projected to reach $367 billion by 2029. Organized retail crime alone costs the economy $70 billion every year. Behind every one of those billions is a real person, a real loss, and a transaction that didn't have to go wrong.

Most people who fight crime do it from the outside looking in. They read reports, they study statistics, they build features based on what they imagine the problem looks like.

I built SafeOrStolen from inside the wreckage.

I understand how stolen property moves. I know how easily someone without resources — someone exactly like Glen — can become entangled in it through no fault of their own. I know the human cost, because I have personally contributed to it and personally witnessed its aftermath. That knowledge isn't abstract for me. It is the entire reason this platform exists.

The irony is not lost on me. A man once convicted of possessing stolen property is now building the tool designed to stop that from happening to others. That is not a contradiction I run from. It is the most honest thing I have ever done with my life.

I am the Founder, CEO, and technical lead of SafeOrStolen.com. I am based in Peoria, Arizona. I am a Christian, a father, and a person who has buried people he loved — my father, my brother Matt, my friend Glen, and most recently my sister April, whose memory is woven into everything I'm still reaching for.

My background check is public. I have acknowledged it transparently and I am actively addressing every outstanding matter with full accountability. Transparency is not a marketing line for me — it is literally the product I sell and the standard I hold myself to.

Our long-term vision is a world where verifying secondhand goods is as normal as checking the weather — routine, instant, and universally trusted. A world where the Glen Thomures of this country don't lose everything because a tool like this didn't exist in time.

We are building that world. We are targeting 350,000 to 500,000 users in year one, over one million globally by year two, and we are actively seeking $500,000 in growth funding to accelerate product development, expand our reach, and deepen our law enforcement partnerships.

Glen Thomure lost everything because this tool didn't exist. I've spent years building it. I will spend the rest of my working life making sure his story doesn't become anyone else's.

That's who I am now. And I'm just getting started.