Innocent Purchaser For Value
Categories: Regulations
So you buy a phone off of Craigslist. Your intuition is telling you that something is...off...but whatever. You’ve got the phone, and it’s a great deal. Until...you get contacted later, only to find out that phone was stolen before it was sold to you. Whoops.
In that case, you’d be legally the “innocent purchaser for value.” An innocent purchaser for value is the person in a transaction who unknowingly (innocently) bought an asset that was involved in crime or fraud before it was sold to them.
In legal cases, final ownership of the disputed good may go to the innocent purchaser for value, or to the original owner; both have legal rights to the asset. It also depends on how long it’s been, since some types of stolen property in some areas (depends on county and state laws) have statutes of limitations when it comes to recovering it. Hang on to your assets for dear life.