15 Times When Pawn Stars Thieves Who Got CAUGHT!

This is the first time.
Heat. Heat.
>> [music] >> Heat. Heat.
Heat. Heat.
Heat. Heat. [music] Heat. Heat.
Heat. Heat.
[music] engraved a ring, a watch, a trophy, that engraving is an identifying mark. It’s essentially that item’s fingerprint.
[music] And when someone deliberately removes an engraving before trying to sell something, the law is very, very clear about what that means. In the United States, removing identifying marks from property is a criminal offense. It doesn’t matter if you claim you bought the item legally. It doesn’t matter if you say you didn’t know. The moment those marks are gone, the item becomes legally untraceable. And that is precisely why thieves do it. The Pawn Stars team has encountered this more than once, and as you’ll see later in this video, it has cost sellers an enormous amount of money and nearly cost the shop far more.
Number 13, the coin that came with a police hold. Ancient coins are some of the most fascinating items that pass through the gold and silver pawn shop.
>> I have an ancient Roman coin I’d like to sell. It’s from 42 BC.
Is that what I think it is?
>> It’s two daggers and it says eyides of March.
>> Collectors will pay extraordinary sums for authenticated pieces and Rick Harrison has developed a sharp eye for them over his decades in the business.
But even Rick, with all his experience, got caught off guard by a coin that seemed almost too good to be true. A man walked in carrying what appeared to be a shekele of tire. A coin from biblical times, used widely across the Middle East more than 2,000 years ago.
Chumley was at the counter first and in classic Chumley fashion, he tried to brush the seller off, claiming they only bought American coins. Rick arrived quickly and it didn’t take long for him to get genuinely excited. Here’s why.
Shekels of tire are real. They existed.
They were incredibly common in the ancient world. But today, two millennia later, finding an authenticated one is a genuinely rare event. And here’s the part that makes collector’s hearts race.
There’s a persistent legend that shekels of tire were the actual coins used to pay Judas a scariot for betraying Jesus Christ. The Bible’s infamous 30 pieces of silver. Now, Rick was quick to clarify on camera. There’s no way to prove any specific coin is one of those 30. But the historical and cultural weight of even owning a shekele of tire enormous. Rick examined the coin closely. The hammer strike technique used to mint ancient coins meant that no two were ever perfectly identical. The off-center edge, the slight imperfections.
Everything about it screamed authentic.
There was just one problem. Someone had cleaned it. cleaning ancient coins, even with the best intentions, strips away patina and can actually reduce value significantly in the collector market.
Still, Rick made an offer. The seller [music] asked for $2,000. Rick pushed back, citing the cleaning. They went back and forth, $1,750, $1,500, $1,600, and finally shook hands at $1,600.
Rick’s family gave him grief immediately. His father, Richard and Chumley, started joking that Rick had just bought one of the 30 pieces of silver, asking if he planned to test it for Jesus DNA. Classic gold and silver pawn shop humor. But Rick was confident.
Then came the knock at the door that changed everything. Andy, the shop’s head of security, pulled Rick aside with news that made Rick’s stomach drop. An out of town detective had contacted Las Vegas police. The shekele Rick had just purchased, there was a strong possibility it was stolen property. The police wanted to put a hold on it immediately. Think about what that means. Rick had just spent $1,600 on a coin that could be seized and returned to its [music] rightful owner with absolutely no compensation.
In the pawn business, that’s not just a loss, it’s a nightmare.
The tension hung over the shop. Every hour the hold remained in place was an hour of uncertainty. Then finally relief.
Andy came back with an update. The original owner had been compensated for their loss and the coin was being released to the shop. Rick could now get it properly authenticated.
They cut open the protective case. The verdict? Real. Completely genuine.
2,000-year-old reel. Rick declared victory. His family, of course, refused to let him enjoy it for even one second.
Number 12, the submarine that wasn’t hers to sell. Stop for a moment and imagine this scenario. You’re Rick Harrison standing in your Las Vegas pawn shop when someone calls and says, “I have something I want to sell you, but you’re going to need to come to me. It doesn’t exactly fit through the front door. That is how Rick ended up inspecting a one-man submarine in someone’s yard. Now, right away, a few questions come to mind, and you should be asking them, too. Who [music] just has a submarine? Where did it come from, and how on earth did it end up sitting in someone’s yard in Las Vegas? The seller explained that someone had given it to her because they didn’t want it anymore. It was just sitting there. She had done some research and found that it was a Star Quest submarine, apparently from the 1980s.
She wanted $25,000.
Rick thought he could maybe go as low as $5,000.
>> What do we have here?
>> A oneman submarine.
>> What is this?
>> Oh, we’re coming to look at a sandwich.
>> Yeah, it’s not a submarine sandwich.
[laughter] >> They eventually settled on $3,000.
Rick brought in a submarine expert who revealed fascinating details. The sub wasn’t actually called Star Quest. That label on the side belonged to an Australian filming company that had purchased the submarine to use for underwater filming. The submarine itself was called the Sea Urchin [music] built in 1994 by Canadian submarine builders.
One-man submarines like this had actually been used since the American colonial era, but modern versions were primarily used by the Navy for patrolling shallow waters. The experts assessment, however, was brutal. The viewing ports needed replacement. The life support system was compromised. The thruster motors were completely gone.
His estimate to make it operational again, $100,000.
He flat out told Rick to scrap it for the metal value. Rick was devastated. He had just paid $3,000 for what was essentially a very expensive, unusually shaped piece of scrap. But here’s where the story takes a genuinely shocking turn. The actual rightful owner of that submarine was a massive fan of Pawn Stars. He was watching his television one evening when the episode aired and he recognized his submarine.
Number 11, the championship ring with a secret. Sports memorabilia is one of the most lucrative categories in the collector market. Recently, I got a lead on a huge collection of Kobe Bryant gameworn memorabilia >> and one of the most frequently faked, stolen, and misrepresented.
Championship rings in particular hold enormous sentimental and financial value. They tell a story. They carry the weight of an entire season, an entire career. Which is exactly why what happened with a Penn State 1973 Orange Bowl ring was so alarming. A seller arrived at the pawn shop carrying a beautiful piece of history. The 1973 Penn State Nitney Lions had an undefeated season, 12 to0, and their Orange Bowl ring was the physical embodiment of that achievement.
The seller claimed he had attended Penn State and purchased the ring directly from a teammate who needed money at the time. Rick and Cory were both intrigued.
Rick has always had a deep appreciation for championship rings, and the Penn State football tradition carries serious weight in the collector community. The seller was asking for $1,500, which for a genuine championship ring from an undefeated season would actually be a reasonable starting point. Then Cory looked closer. The engraving had been removed. Every championship ring is custom engraved with the player’s name and number. This one had belonged to a player named Jeff Clark, an outside linebacker for the 1973 team. But the engraving, Jeff Clark’s name, his number, had been deliberately ground away. Someone had taken a tool to this ring and removed the very information that made it identifiable.
Cory’s response was immediate and firm.
This was not a gray area. Removing identifying marks from an item makes it illegal to buy or sell. He compared it to purchasing a car with the VIN number stripped out. You don’t do it. Period.
Not because it’s inconvenient, not because it lowers the value, because it is a criminal act to possess and transfer an item whose identifying marks have been deliberately removed. The seller pushed back. He argued it was still a Penn State ring, still from 1973, still historically significant.
Rick sympathized, but there was nothing he could do. No identification meant no sale. The seller left frustrated, muttering that he knew a thousand people he could have sold the ring to and made a profit. [music] And maybe he could have, but those thousand people, wherever they are, would have been buying a stolen ring. Because the only reason to remove engraving from a championship ring is to hide who it really belongs to. Number 10, the diamond that wasn’t. How well do you know your gems? Here’s a test. Hold up a diamond to the light. Now hold up a piece of cubic zirconia, a synthetic stone that looks almost identical to a diamond to the naked eye. Can you tell the difference? Unless you have specialized equipment or years of experience, the honest answer is probably no. And back in the early days of the gold and silver pawn shop, neither could Rick’s father, the legendary old man. Cubic zirconia, CZ, as it’s known in the trade, first appeared on the commercial market in the late 1970s.
Before jewelers and pawn shop owners developed the knowledge and the testing tools to identify it, CZ passed as a real diamond repeatedly. The stones tested as diamonds on basic testers.
They looked like diamonds. They sparkled like diamonds. They were diamonds. To everyone who didn’t know better, the old man didn’t know better. not yet. And so in the early days of the shop, he bought cubic zirconia stones in significant quantities, believing he was purchasing real diamonds. The financial damage was staggering. By the old man’s own account, losses came close to $25,000 to $30,000.
That was not a small amount of money, especially not for a pawn shop trying to build its reputation. But here is what separates great business [music] people from those who get fooled twice. The old man learned. He learned hard and he learned permanently. The shop began conducting demonstrations for both staff and customers, showcasing exactly how to distinguish CZ from genuine diamonds using proper equipment, thermal conductivity testers, loop examination, refractive index measurement. The education cost $30,000. The lesson priceless.
Number nine. When the law walks through the front door. There is a moment in every Pawn Stars episode that regular viewers know well. The moment when Rick’s face changes. When he stops negotiating. When his voice gets quieter and more deliberate. [music] That is the moment when Rick realizes the item in front of him might not be what the seller claims or might not legally belong to the seller at all. Pawn shops are required by law to work closely with local law enforcement. In Las Vegas, pawn shops submit records of every single transaction to the police. Every item, every seller, every price. Law enforcement cross references these records against reports of stolen property constantly.
This means that every person who walks into the gold and silver pawn shop trying to sell stolen goods is in a very real sense walking directly into a trap.
The moment the transaction is recorded, the clock starts ticking. The Pawn Stars team has had police contact them on multiple occasions about items that turned out to be stolen. And when that happens, the outcome is the same every time. The item is seized, no compensation is paid to the shop, and the seller faces criminal charges. For potential thieves watching this right now, because we know some of you are, let that sink in. There is no just sell it at a pawn shop and disappear.
Those records exist. The police have access. And Rick Harrison has been doing this for decades. Number eight, the fake antique that wasn’t old at all. One of the most common scams attempted at pawn shops across the country involves artificially aged items. A basic piece of furniture, a painting, a piece of pottery, treated with chemicals, stained, distressed, and presented as a genuine antique worth far more than it actually is. Rick Harrison has seen this trick more times than he can count. His response is always the same. He calls an expert. This is something the Pawn Stars audience has seen on virtually every episode. Rick picks up the phone and says, “I know a guy. That guy might be a historian, an appraiser, a material scientist, or a document authenticator.
Whatever the item is, Rick [music] finds someone who knows it better than anyone.
And when those experts find evidence of artificial aging, inconsistent wear patterns, modern chemical treatments, and supposedly ancient wood grain, anacronistic construction techniques, the scam collapses immediately. The seller is exposed, the sale falls through, and the shop stays protected.
The message is consistent. If you try to fake an antique in front of Rick Harrison, [music] you are going to get caught. He has spent 30 years building a network of experts precisely for that reason.
Number seven, the document that couldn’t be authenticated. Signed historical documents, letters from famous figures, first edition books with personal inscriptions.
These items can be worth extraordinary sums of money. A letter signed by Abraham Lincoln, a document bearing George Washington’s signature, an inscription from a celebrated author in the first printing of a classic novel.
They can also be faked, and they are faked constantly.
The market for forged historical documents is enormous. Skilled forggers have fooled major auction houses, private collectors, and museum curators.
The techniques involved are sophisticated period accurate paper, period accurate ink formulations, precise study of the targets handwriting, accelerated aging processes.
At the Golden Silver Pawn Shop, the team doesn’t guess on documents. They bring in handwriting analysts. They bring in historians. They submit samples for chemical testing. And far more often than sellers realize, the [music] results come back not authentic.
What happens next depends on the situation. If there’s any suspicion that the document was deliberately misrepresented rather than the seller simply being mistaken about what they had, the shop may decline the sale and contact law enforcement. Fraud is fraud, regardless of how elegantly it’s been executed. Number six, the guitar you couldn’t legally sell. Now we come to one of the most unusual legal tangles in Pawn Star’s history. A case that wasn’t about theft or fraud, but about a law that most people have never heard of.
And a seller who genuinely seemed to not know what he was holding.
A man walked into the Gold and Silver Pawn shop with a guitar, not an electric guitar.
>> This is the most beautiful acoustic guitar you have ever seen. A Gibson Custom Shop SJ200. Not a mass-produced acoustic, [music] a guitar with a shell that had a rich, warm quality unlike anything most people have ever seen. Browns, reds, oranges, subtle patterns that seemed to shift in the light. It was made of tortoise shell. Now, the seller was actually upfront about something most people would hide. He wasn’t sure this guitar was legal to sell. He had done some research and found that the UK government had confiscated a similar guitar through customs. The Australian government had one, too. Something was clearly off. Rick’s knowledge of the issue was immediate. Tortois shell was hugely popular for centuries. Used in combs, sunglasses, guitar picks. Tortois shell was real popular back in the day for making combs, sunglasses, guitar picks, all sorts of stuff. It looks cool and it’s incredibly durable. decorative items of all kinds. The material has a natural beauty that synthetic [music] substitutes have never quite replicated.
But in the early 1970s, several tortoise species were classified as endangered and the international trade in tortoise shell was banned under sites. The convention on international trade in endangered species. The ban had one critical clause. Items made from tortoise shell before the early 1970s were potentially grandfathered in as legal. Items made after were not. The problem was determining which category this guitar fell into. Rick compared it to the laws around bald eagle feathers.
Even if you found one on the ground and had no idea it was illegal to possess, you could still be charged with a federal offense. Ignorance of the law, as the saying goes, is no excuse. Rick consulted a friend with expertise in the area. The friend’s conclusion, owning the guitar was probably fine, but selling it was a legal gray area that nobody wanted to test. The seller left with his guitar, deeply uncertain about what he was even allowed to do with it, and deeply concerned about his two daughters and the prospect of unwanted jail visits. The guitar was beautiful.
The situation, a legal minefield that no amount of negotiation could resolve.
Number five, the shekele of tire. The full story. We touched on this earlier, but the full story of the shekele of tire deserves its own dedicated spotlight.
>> The shekele of tire was a really common coin a couple thousand years ago in the Middle East >> because what happened with that coin captures everything that makes pawn stars genuinely compelling television.
A man named Ryan arrived at the shop with a coin he identified as a shekele of tire. He believed it was from biblical times and he was right. The shekele of tire was the standard currency of the ancient Levant common across the Middle East more than 2,000 years ago. Used for everything from everyday commerce to the payment of the temple tax in Jerusalem.
Chumley tried to wave him off. We only buy American coins, man. Chumley being Chumley. Rick arrived and took one look at the coin. His interest was immediate and obvious. Here’s what makes shekels of tire so compelling. They were minted using an extraordinary process.
Craftsmen used hammers 4 ft long with the coin design carved into the face of the hammer. They would stand 4 ft back from the coin blank and strike. Even the most skilled craftsmen in the ancient world could not guarantee a perfect strike every time. The result? Every single shekele of tire ever minted is slightly offc center. No two are identical. They are in their imperfection completely authentic. Rick examined the coin. Everything was right.
The weight, the design, the off-center strike, the metal composition.
Everything about this is perfect, he said on camera. Then came the caveat that tempered his enthusiasm. Someone had cleaned it. Whether out of ignorance or an attempt to make it more presentable, the cleaning had stripped away patina and in collector terms reduced the coin’s value. The negotiation went back and forth. Ryan asked for $2,000.
Rick offered $1,400.
Ryan held firm. They settled at $1,600.
Then Andy walked in with news about a police hold. Then the hold was lifted.
Then the coin was authenticated as genuine. And through it all, Chumley and Richard gave Rick absolutely no peace whatsoever.
The coin was real. The scare was real.
And the lesson that even legitimate items can carry complicated histories was as real as it gets. Number four, the submarine. The twist that changed everything.
We’ve already told you about the submarine. The Sea urchin, built in 1994, purchased by an Australian filming company, ending up in a Las Vegas yard.
The deal Rick made for $3,000.
The expert who called it scrap iron. But let’s sit with the twist for a moment because it deserves more than a passing mention. The owner of that submarine, the real legal owner, was sitting in his home somewhere watching pawn stars on television. Maybe with a beer, maybe with his family. And then his submarine appeared on screen. Not a submarine like his. His submarine being handled, inspected, and purchased by [music] Rick Harrison without the actual owner’s knowledge or consent. Can you imagine that moment? the surge of disbelief, the scramble to find a phone and call a lawyer, the absolute certainty that what you were seeing was not a coincidence.
The legal process that followed was straightforward in principle, but complex in execution.
The submarine had been taken and transferred without the owner’s consent.
That is, by definition, theft. The fact that it had passed through intermediary hands before ending up at Pawn Stars did not make Rick Harrison culpable. He had no way of knowing the true ownership history. But the submarine had to be returned. Rick’s $3,000 investment walked out the door. The woman who sold it had sold something that was never hers to sell, and the actual owner got his submarine back, having watched the entire ordeal unfold on national television. Number three, Penn State’s missing identity. The Penn State Orange Bowl ring story.
>> Every Super Bowl ring I’ve ever had that was made by Justins is engraved like that. This looks like it’s in sloppy hand engraving. I mean, the the the workmanship and everything looks wonderful.
>> Is one that reveals an uncomfortable truth about how stolen items circulate through the market. When a championship ring is stolen, the thief faces an immediate problem. It’s identifiable. It has the player’s name on it, his number, the team’s [music] record, the year.
Anyone who knows anything about sports memorabilia can trace it directly back to its owner. The solution some thieves use, the solution that was clearly used with Jeff Clark’s ring, is to remove those identifying marks, grind them away, make the ring anonymous.
But here’s what those thieves don’t understand. Removing the identifying marks doesn’t make the item less suspicious. It makes it more suspicious.
It broadcasts the problem to every experienced buyer who sees it. Cory Harrison recognized what had happened instantly. Rick Harrison knew what it meant immediately by trying to erase the ring’s history. Whoever removed that engraving didn’t just reduce its value.
They made it impossible to sell through any legitimate channel. And somewhere out there, Jeff Clark, the outside linebacker who earned that ring as part of an undefeated Penn State squad in 1973, was missing a piece of history that belonged to him. A piece of history that someone else tried to profit from and couldn’t because the gold and silver pawn shop doesn’t play games with stolen property. Number two, the diamond scam that cost $30,000.
Let’s be precise about the scale of what happened to the old man. $25,000 to $30,000.
That’s what Rick’s father lost before the shop understood what cubic zirconia was and how to identify it. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, that was an enormous sum. For a pawn shop building its reputation and its inventory, it was a devastating hit. The people who sold those CZ stones to the old man knew exactly what they were selling. They knew the stones weren’t real diamonds.
They knew the old man didn’t have the equipment or the knowledge to tell the difference. They exploited that gap deliberately, repeatedly, and profitably. That is fraud. Simple, direct, unapologetic fraud. What makes this story remarkable isn’t just the loss. It’s what the Harrison family did with the experience. They didn’t hide it. They talked about it openly on camera. They used it as a teaching moment, demonstrating on air exactly how to distinguish CZ from a genuine diamond. The thermal conductivity differences, the specific gravity variations, the subtle refractive distinctions that become obvious once you know what you’re looking for. In sharing that story, the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop did something valuable not just for their own operation, but for every viewer who might one day be in the market for diamonds and needs to know what questions to ask and what tests to demand. The scam [music] that cost $30,000 may have educated millions.
Number one, the tortoise guitar. Beauty, law, and the line you cannot cross. We saved this one for last because it is perhaps the most layered and thought-provoking story on this entire list. Most of the cases we’ve covered today involved deliberate deception, [music] stolen items, removed identifying marks, fake diamonds, fraudulent documents, clear bad actors with clear intentions.
The tortoise shell guitar case is [music] different, and that difference matters. The seller came in and immediately voluntarily told Rick he wasn’t sure the guitar was legal to sell. He had researched it. He knew governments had seized similar instruments. He was being transparent.
He wasn’t trying to deceive anyone. And yet, transparency doesn’t automatically make something legal. The guitar was beautiful. The tortoise shell was genuine, extraordinary, and irreplaceable. and the law around it was ambiguous enough that even Rick’s expert friend couldn’t give a clean answer.
Here’s the deeper question this story raises, and it’s one that applies far beyond pawn shops and guitars.
What is your responsibility when you possess something whose legal status is genuinely unclear? When you didn’t do anything wrong to acquire it, but you also can’t prove it’s fully above board.
The seller in this case made the right call. He asked the question instead of pretending it didn’t exist. He walked away without making a sale, but he also walked away without legal exposure.
The guitar, if it was pre 1970s, might be completely legal to own and even sell, or it might not. The only way to find out for certain would be through a process the seller wasn’t prepared to undertake at that moment.
Rick’s advice was essentially, figure it out properly before you try to sell it.
Don’t guess. Don’t hope. No. That advice, know what you have and know whether it’s yours to sell, is the thread that runs through every single story on this list. The final word, 15 stories.
15 moments when the cameras were rolling, the stakes were real, and the people standing on the other side of Rick Harrison’s counter learned a very expensive lesson. Some of them knew exactly what they were doing. The sellers of fake diamonds knew CZ wasn’t real. Whoever removed Jeff Clark’s engraving knew precisely why they were doing it. The woman who sold the submarine either knew it wasn’t hers or chose not to find out. Others were genuinely caught in complicated situations, a coin with a clouded history, a guitar with uncertain legal status, a ring that passed through too many hands before anyone asked the right questions.
But the outcome for all of them was the same. The gold and silver pawn shop did not let it slide. That’s what 30 years of experience, a deep network of experts, and a genuine commitment to operating legally and ethically looks like in practice. Rick Harrison has made his share of bad deals. He’s been fooled. He’s taken losses. But he has built a business that treats authenticity, legality, and provenence as non-negotiable. And that is why after all these years, the shop is still standing.
Before you go, drop a comment below.
Which of these 15 moments shocked you the most? The submarine that wasn’t hers to sell? The championship ring with the erased identity? The $30,000 diamond disaster? Let us know. And if you want to see more of the biggest, most expensive, most outrageous scams ever attempted on Pawn Stars, check out our video on the most expensive scams in the show’s history. The numbers will absolutely blow your mind. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and hit that notification bell so you never miss another Pawn Stars deep dive. We’ll see you in the next one.