A Knife for Sale From a Seller Who Cannot Name It

The listing had a price. What it did not have was an answer. A knifeclub user asked the seller whether the scales were carbon fiber or titanium and got "IDK." He asked again, more simply — metal, or kind of plastic? "Not sure." The price, though, was firm.

That gap is what the thread fastened onto, and it is a fair instinct. A seller who has handled a knife enough to price it usually knows what it is made of. A seller who cannot say whether the handle is metal is either disinterested, reselling something they never opened, or working from someone else's inventory. The community's first reply was blunt: if someone is selling a knife like that and has no idea what it is, they probably stole it.

Others offered the boring explanations, which are usually the true ones. An estate situation where a family member died and the property is being moved. A seller who does not physically have the knife in hand and is listing it for someone else. A flipper who bought a lot at auction and never looked closely. None of those are crimes, and all of them produce exactly this conversation.

The knives themselves got identified quickly, which is the useful part. The blade is marked Mongoose, and commenters placed it as a Jerry Moen piece — a titanium-scale Mongoose, with at least one regular pointing out he prefers Moen's carbon fiber versions. That is a custom maker's knife, not a gas-station special, which is precisely why the vague listing was suspicious to people who knew what they were looking at.

The practical advice in the thread is worth keeping: ask who makes it. If the answer is "I don't know," either walk away or price the risk in and buy it cheap. A seller who cannot identify a Moen Mongoose has not priced it as one, and that asymmetry runs both ways.

Verdict: the thread is not really about stolen knives. It is about the one question that separates a deal from a problem — and the fact that "not sure" is itself an answer.