Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief
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Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief
#2> stolen out of her mailbox at the Los Alamos Post Office
All the P.O. mailboxes I've ever seen have locks. What's going on? Was the thief actually a USPS employee?
Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief
#3> stolen out of her mailbox at the Los Alamos Post Office All the P.O. mailboxes I've ever seen have locks. What's going on? Was the thief actually a USPS employee?
I had the exact same question. This seems like a much bigger crime than the story is letting on. Also, shouldn't this be handled at least jointly by a federal agency? I didn't see any mention of federal charges.
Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief
#4I've come to believe that acceptance of crime is a choice by officials. Many low level crimes I've witnessed are trivial to catch. For instance, find out where porch thieves like to hit. Plant a package there and park a patrol car there for a few hours and chances are you'll catch someone. Or put in a tracker. A cop can get a bike stolen in hours in the right neighborhoods in NYC.
If a youtuber can park their car with a ps4 in the trunk and record someone breaking in just a few hours later, I don't see why police can't do this.
And it's only a handful of people engaged in this low level crime. Arrest a few. And if they have a dozen prior arrests, like many of them do, keep them in jail for a while. And if they're doing anti-social crimes like punching random women in the street, remove them from society and let them cool off for a few years (it's almost always 18-29 yos).
Soon the economics doesn't make sense or the worst are spending their most chaotic years in prison. It's quite simple and effective. But for whatever reason, police or prosecutors are uninterested in stopping this type of crime.
Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief
#5[deleted]
Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief
#6> stolen out of her mailbox at the Los Alamos Post Office All the P.O. mailboxes I've ever seen have locks. What's going on? Was the thief actually a USPS employee?
Some mailboxes at least used to have a common key. Alternately it's probably not that difficult to pick the lock.
Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief
#7> stolen out of her mailbox at the Los Alamos Post Office All the P.O. mailboxes I've ever seen have locks. What's going on? Was the thief actually a USPS employee?
Aren't there two locks? One, a master keyed lock for post office employees to fill the boxes and the other is individually keyed for customer access. Perhaps the crooks obtained a master key by either bribing an employee, cloned one, or stole one.
Back in high school a friend was obsessed with the MTA subway and had a neighbor who was an MTA employee. He somehow convinced them to hand over their keys which had both the strait and S shaped ward keys to the subway cars and the pad locks in the stations. He duplicated the warded keys using nails and sheet metal and the padlock key using just a nail and a file. We both had sets of keys and could unlock anything we wanted. All it took was one irresponsible employee handing their keys to a 16 YO.
Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief
#8I've come to believe that acceptance of crime is a choice by officials. Many low level crimes I've witnessed are trivial to catch. For instance, find out where porch thieves like to hit. Plant a package there and park a patrol car there for a few hours and chances are you'll catch someone. Or put in a tracker. A cop can get a bike stolen in hours in the right neighborhoods in NYC. If a youtuber can park their car wit…
I think it heavily depends on what local district attorneys policies are. Police may not see a point in taking a risk by apprehending someone just for them to be released hours later anyway.
Not a huge fan of US police departments in general but this isn't necessarily all on them.
Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief
#9I never lived in a country where the delivery guy just leaves your shit out in the open. Why is this common in the US, when in most "safe" EU countries, people would never trust such a practice? Seems like an anti-consumer practice enforced by industry on the consumer.
No, packages should not be stolen from people's porch. But realistically, it's very hard to stop this crime of opportunity.
Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief
#10> stolen out of her mailbox at the Los Alamos Post Office All the P.O. mailboxes I've ever seen have locks. What's going on? Was the thief actually a USPS employee?
A LOT of locks out there are pathetically easy to bypass even by an amateur picker.