Is it stolen?

[genetic]

We had a Dell stolen a couple weeks back, similar laptop has now appeared at local pawn shop.
It now has a sticker on it with serial no not recognized by Dell 72587679966

How would you even begin to prove it might be our stolen unit?

If you're able to power the machine on, run this command in Command Prompt (CMD) to get the serial number at a hardware level;

wmic bios get serialnumber

 

[supersunbird]

We had a Dell stolen a couple weeks back, similar laptop has now appeared at local pawn shop.
It now has a sticker on it with serial no not recognized by Dell 72587679966

How would you even begin to prove it might be our stolen unit?

The Dell tag nr will be in BIOS. or run open command prompt and run wmic bios get serialnumber and it will display the Dell tag nr.