Examples of larceny range from the obvious — walking out of a store with unpaid merchandise — to situations most people don’t recognize as theft at all, like keeping a found wallet or accepting a down payment for work you never intend to perform. The FBI defines larceny as the unlawful taking or carrying away of property from another person’s possession.1Federal Bureau of Investigation. Larceny-Theft What ties the examples together is intent: the person taking the property means to keep it, and the owner never agreed to give it up.
Taking Property Directly
The classic form of larceny is physically moving someone else’s property without their permission. The property only has to be moved a short distance for the crime to be complete.
Shoplifting is the most common example. It covers more than slipping an item into a bag and walking out. Switching price tags so you pay less than the real price counts. So does transferring merchandise into a different package to disguise what you’re really buying. Retailers treat even low-value shoplifting as prosecutable.
Pickpocketing and purse-snatching are larceny when there’s no force involved — lifting a wallet from a back pocket or taking a phone someone set down on a table. The moment force or intimidation enters the picture, the charge becomes robbery instead.
Stealing unattended property is another everyday example. Taking a bicycle locked to a rack, grabbing a laptop while its owner is in the restroom, or removing items from an unlocked car all qualify. The FBI specifically lists bicycle theft and theft of motor vehicle parts among the most common larceny categories it tracks.2Federal Bureau of Investigation. Larceny-Theft
Keeping Something You Found
Finding lost property and keeping it can be larceny. If you pick up a wallet, see the owner’s ID inside, and pocket the cash without making any effort to return it, most states treat that as theft. The key factors are whether you had a reasonable way to identify the owner and whether you tried. Finding something isn’t the same as being entitled to keep it.
Getting Property Through Lies
A lot of larceny doesn’t involve snatching anything. The victim hands the property over willingly — but because that willingness was secured by a lie, the law doesn’t treat it as real consent. There are two versions of this, split by what the liar actually walks away with.
Larceny by Trick
Larceny by trick is when someone uses a lie to get temporary possession of property, with no intention of giving it back. The owner still legally owns the item. Cornell’s Legal Information Institute offers a textbook example: a person borrows a car and promises to return it Monday but never intended to bring it back.3Legal Information Institute. Larceny by Trick Asking a jeweler to “try on” a ring and then walking out with it works the same way. So does borrowing expensive equipment under a false story about what you need it for.
False Pretenses
False pretenses goes a step further: the victim transfers actual ownership based on the lie, not just possession. A contractor who collects a large down payment for a renovation while knowing he’ll never do the work has committed this offense. A person who sets up a fake online storefront, takes payment for products that don’t exist, and disappears is another example. The distinction between larceny by trick and false pretenses matters because many states charge them separately, and the line turns on whether the victim gave up possession or ownership.3Legal Information Institute. Larceny by Trick
Theft by Someone With Lawful Access
Embezzlement is theft by a person who was supposed to have the property in the first place. Traditional larceny requires a “trespassory taking” — the thief wasn’t allowed near the property. Embezzlers start with lawful access and then divert the property for their own use. Because that initial taking wasn’t illegal, legislatures created embezzlement as a separate crime, and the FBI tracks it separately in its crime statistics.4Legal Information Institute. Embezzlement2Federal Bureau of Investigation. Larceny-Theft
In practice, many modern state statutes have rolled larceny, embezzlement, and false pretenses together under a single “theft” umbrella, so an embezzler is often prosecuted under the same theft statute as a shoplifter.
Common examples include:
- An employee with authorized access to company accounts redirecting funds into a personal account.
- An accountant skimming from client trust funds.
- A corporate officer running personal expenses through a company credit card and disguising them as business costs.
- A nonprofit treasurer using the organization’s checking account to pay personal bills.
The prosecution only needs to show that the person had lawful possession because of their position and then fraudulently converted the property to personal use.4Legal Information Institute. Embezzlement
What Isn’t Larceny: Robbery and Burglary
Two crimes that get mistaken for larceny are robbery and burglary. They look similar on the surface and often appear in the same incident, but they’re legally distinct and carry heavier penalties.
- Robbery is taking property directly from a person using force, threats, or intimidation. A mugging is robbery. If you snatch a purse by shoving the victim, that’s robbery, not larceny.
- Burglary is entering a building without authorization intending to commit a crime inside. At common law, burglary meant breaking and entering a dwelling at night to commit a felony; most states have expanded the definition well beyond that. The core element is the unlawful entry, not the theft, so you can be charged with burglary even if you never actually take anything.5Legal Information Institute. Breaking and Entering
The charges can stack. Someone who breaks into a house and steals a television can face both burglary and larceny. The reason the labels matter is simple: they can be the difference between a misdemeanor and years in prison.
Petty Larceny vs. Grand Larceny
The same act of taking can be charged as either a misdemeanor or a felony depending on the value of what was stolen. Petty larceny (sometimes called petit larceny) covers lower-value thefts and is charged as a misdemeanor. Grand larceny applies to higher-value thefts and is a felony.
The dollar threshold that divides them varies dramatically by state. Some states set the felony line as low as $200. Others don’t reach felony territory until the stolen property is worth $2,500 or more. Most states fall somewhere between $750 and $1,500. The identical act of stealing a $1,000 item can be a misdemeanor in one state and a felony in the next.
Petty larceny generally carries fines and up to one year in jail. Grand larceny can bring prison sentences well beyond that. At the federal level, theft of government property worth more than $1,000 is punishable by up to ten years in prison; theft under $1,000 carries up to one year.6Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 641 – Public Money, Property or Records
Certain types of property trigger felony charges no matter what they’re worth. In many states, stealing a firearm or a motor vehicle is grand larceny even if the market value would otherwise put the item below the felony line. That’s worth knowing before assuming a low-dollar item means a low-level charge.