UESP Forums

I heard somewhere that if I put one of my own items in a container owned by an NPC, it may/will mark that item as stolen. I tried this by going to the Ralen Hlaalo house, going to one of the crates inside the first floor (same room as his dead body). With ToggleFullHelp in the console, I was able see that the crate was owned by Hlaalo, and also I looked at a Potion of Mark that I legit bought from an alchemist, and the tooltip didn't have any owner info, which confirms that I owned it.

I then put the potion in the crate, then took it back out. I was expecting to see that the potion is now owned by Hlaalo, but to my surprise, it still had no owner info, which seems to indicate that I still owned the potion.

When does this "marking items as stolen" thing happen? As a followup question, will this effect every happen with dead bodies (as opposed to containers)?

Honestly this is similar to my experience - the game's behavior WRT owned and stolen items seems not just unintuitive, but also really inconsistent. I had Percius Mercius' lawfully given glass armor flagged as stolen, but stuff I actually stole often not. Maybe it also depends on whether anyone sees you stealing it?

Curious BTW if you're running OpenMW. If so, given that this seems different from the behavior described for the original game, I wonder if it might be a bug.