What Is LeadsOnline?

The short answer: LeadsOnline (also written LEADS Online) is an online investigation system that lets law enforcement search transaction records reported by businesses dealing in used property — pawn shops, secondhand dealers, scrap-metal recyclers and gold buyers. Businesses report what they take in; detectives search those records to find and recover stolen property. It's free for the businesses that report; the law enforcement agencies pay for it.

How LeadsOnline works

The system has two sides:

• The reporting side (your side). Businesses submit their transactions — who sold or pawned an item, their ID details, and what the item was, including descriptions and serial numbers. Reports go in through the LeadsOnline web portal by hand, or as formatted files uploaded automatically by point-of-sale software.
• The investigation side. Subscribing law enforcement agencies search the reported data — by serial number, item description, or person — across every reporting business, not just the ones in their own town. A detective in one city can spot stolen goods pawned three states away.

The serial number is the workhorse of the whole system: it's the field that gets matched against stolen-property reports. That's why accurate serial-number capture at the counter matters more than any other part of reporting.

Who runs LeadsOnline?

LeadsOnline, LLC is a private company headquartered in Plano, Texas, operating since the early 2000s. It sells subscriptions to law enforcement agencies — thousands of departments across the United States use it — and provides reporting access to businesses at no charge. It is not a government agency, but reporting to it is how many businesses satisfy a government requirement: local ordinances and police departments designate it as the accepted electronic reporting method.

What data does it hold, and who can see it?

Reported records typically include the seller or pledgor's identity (name, address, date of birth, government ID, physical description), the item details (category, description, brand, serial number, often a photo), and the transaction facts (date, ticket number, amount). This data is not public — it's searchable by subscribing law enforcement agencies for investigative purposes. Your customers can't look each other up, your competitors can't see your volume, and the general public has no access.

Who has to report?

There's no single nationwide law. Reporting obligations come from state statutes, city and county ordinances, and police department policy — and the specific requirement to use LeadsOnline is usually set at the local level. The common reporters are pawn shops, secondhand and resale stores, scrap-metal recyclers, and precious-metal buyers. Online marketplaces like eBay also share transaction data with the system for investigations. For a breakdown of how the requirements are structured and where to check your own, see who has to report to LeadsOnline, by state.

LeadsOnline, RAPID and BWI

LeadsOnline isn't the only system of its kind. In Canada, the equivalent is RAPID, originally developed by Business Watch International (BWI) and now part of the LeadsOnline family. Some US jurisdictions also use regional or department-specific systems. Which system you report to is decided by your police department — not by you — which is why good pawn software supports report generation rather than being hard-wired to a single portal. For the full picture, see LeadsOnline vs RAPID vs BWI.

What LeadsOnline means for your shop, practically

Three things:

• A recurring task. Most reporting jurisdictions expect each business day's transactions submitted daily. Done by hand in the portal, that's a second data-entry job every night — see what manual entry costs and how to automate it.
• A data-quality standard. Your intake process has to capture every field the report needs — ID details, full descriptions, serial numbers — at the counter, the first time.
• A relationship with your police department. Complete, on-time reporting is the single biggest factor in whether that relationship is routine or adversarial.

Frequently Asked Questions

PawnSmarts is independent pawn shop software and is not affiliated with or endorsed by LeadsOnline, LLC. LeadsOnline and RAPID are trademarks of their owners.