I just don't understand this line of thinking at all. You rent something out for a specific and agreed upon period of time. The person decides to keep the thing you rented out. And it's not theft? Also how is it not lost?
I rent a camera from you for $70 a day, ostensibly for one day. My shoot doesn’t work out, so I keep it for three days. Did I commit theft?
Obviously, when I return it three days later, it is not theft. We can argue whether I owe you $70, $210, or much more, but to the police, that is very much a civil argument.
Now consider the situation between when I agreed to return it and when I actually returned it, like the day after it was due back.
Have I stolen the camera? No, we just disagree on the terms of a transaction where you voluntarily rented me a camera.
This “Mark” individual seemed to use fraud (photoshopping id?) to rent the camera, and that ought to be a crime in itself. But if he rented it in his own name, and the police showed up at his door, and he returned the camera, he could argue that he was renting it for a year, and how much he owes is a civil matter.
I don’t like this line of reasoning myself, but I can see why the police and insurance companies take the line that if you voluntarily give something to someone, it is not theft if they don’t return it, it is a dispute over the terms and conditions of your giving them the chattel.
I'm actually curious as to what happens in the cases of delinquent renters - but I assume it involves things like court orders, or perhaps they just try to find the car and tow it away under existing repo laws, then send the account to collections.
But if you rent your camera out every day, eventually some fraudster will steal it by not returning it. And the risk of that happening likely depends on how well the renter is screening prospective renters. That makes it tough to insure. KikSplit says its a 1/1000 occurrence, but you can't just charge a .1% premium because if KikSplit does a shitty job of keeping out fraudsters, then it might be 2/100. Things that are tough to insure are expensive to insure.
It would be interesting if someone stole for the first time like this. They could decide first to take the chance to steal it, and once they have the potentially stolen goods, decide whether or not to return it. Then the moment where they became a thief would be a fuzzy period of time between the time it was agreed to return it to the time he sold the equipment to a third party.