An idea to reduce porch piracy
So as it is every year around Christmas people in my neighborhood have porch pirates plucking packages from people’s porches. I was reading in our district neighborhood group about three just in the past week, which means significantly more because not everyone’s in the group, and it will be weeks before some figure out that a friend sent them a gift that never arrived.
So I had an idea.
Porch pirates generally, at least in our area, are drive-by view and grab, take elsewhere (usually an alley,) open and discard the packaging and leave. They then sell online or through other channels.
As it’s a crime of opportunity, why not make it a crime with a very low chance of success by repackaging things like dirt, books you might want to offer them, full water bottles, etc. Then leave the package on your porch in plain view all the time.
I mean, leave a package with the wrong address printed on it so they can’t easily come back to return your rocks through your window (not that I suspect they would as you’ll report when you get pirated,) and remember when they discover this is garbage they’re going to dump it in an alley or someone’s back yard, so no uranium, cat litter, poop, etc. that you don’t want an unsuspecting neighbor to have to deal with.
Drop the success rate from porch piracy from 100% to 20% and see what happens in your neighborhood.
Or maybe I’m missing something, in which case let me know.
I read this idea somewhere online, in places affected by parcel pouching, use Amazon boxes to pack items you no longer want and are designed for a skip or charity. A service with a collection :)
I proposed it to our neighborhood and everyone’s talking about putting in poop, diapers, cat litter, extremely hard to deal with garbage… me, I keep saying it’s going to get opened in the back yard of some random neighbor, them: what about tacks…
Look for the Mark Rober YouTube video where he made a glitter bomb with camera and gps tracker. Just brilliant!
Look for the Mark Rober YouTube video where he made a glitter bomb with camera and gps tracker. Just brilliant!
And unfortunately somewhat fake
oh, that’s disappointing, he faked the videos of the victims?
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/21/glitter-bomb-video-was-partially-faked-former-nasa-engineer-confirms.html
Two of the thieves were acquaintances of the person he asked to put the package on their porch.
Basically the story goes Rober agreed to pay X for putting package out and some amount for recovery. X decided they wanted money and got people to “steal” it.